Is Coal on the Way Out?

There is good news on the energy and environmental fronts: the use of coal is declining, and fast.  Jonathan Fahey of the Associated Press reports in a new article that the proportion of U.S. electrical generation powered by coal has dropped from 50% to less than 40%  in just the past four years.  The reason?  Natural gas is now beating coal, not only to meet tighter EPA clean air regulations, but also on price as supplies unleashed by new technologies become more abundant.

To show you how fast this is happening, natural gas "will be used to produce 29% of the country's electricity this year, up from 20% in 2008."  Another 20% comes from nuclear power plants, and 11% comes from renewable sources such as hydroelectric, wind and solar.  To underscore how much this trend is worrying the coal industry, I saw a TV commercial from them this morning.  Click on this link to see how they are pushing back.

The transition is environmentally significant because, as the AP article reports, "Power plants that burn coal produce more than 90 times as much sulfur dioxide, five times as much nitrogen oxide and twice as much carbon dioxide as those that run on natural gas, according to the Government Accountability Office, the regulatory arm of Congress. Sulfur dioxide causes acid rain; nitrogen oxides cause smog; and carbon dioxide is a so-called greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere."  This March, EPA issued new regulations that would make it virtually impossible to build any new coal-fired power plants unless they can develop a cost-competitive way to capture the carbon dioxide.  So far things are not going well in the effort to produce this technology.

The apparent coming phaseout of coal for power generation in the United States is certainly a step in the right direction.  Half the CO2 and a lot less of the poisons associated with coal while cutting costs and keeping production and jobs domestic is a win on all fronts.  It should not, however, be viewed as a permanent or the best solution.  While certainly better than burning coal, burning natural gas still generates a lot of greenhouse gasses, and the "fracking" process used to free the gas from subterranean rock strata is a threat to water tables and in some cases even to geological stability.  Read up on some of the threats here.

The long-term responsible solution remains with renewable and non-polluting energy sources, but the move to natural gas is at least better than what we have been doing, and is therefore a positive development.