Recently in Coal Category

In the debate over how shale gas drilling should be regulated, Albert Appleton, an infrastructure and environmental consultant, says one aspect of the issue is being overlooked: Who will pay the environmental costs?

"Over the next 10 years, it will become ever more apparent that the existing hydrocarbon-based energy industry will be playing a game of last-man-standing in which the prize will go to the industry or the components of particular industries that are more efficient and more sustainable," he said in testimony offered on June 4 to the House Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee.

Fifty-five percent of people responding to a Lawrence, Kansas, newspaper poll this afternoon said they were not surprised that only a week after Kathleen Sebelius left the governor's office to become secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Kansas made a deal ending its iconic battle with Sunflower Electric. (A few minutes later the vote tally had moved closer to half and half: Half the people were surprised, the other half not. Alright, there were only 58 voters at the time. Still, they must have been people interested enough to follow the issue.)

The newspaper called today's announcement a "stunning development." It was, whether one was entirely surprised or not. The Sunflower battle has been a kind of flagship case for anti-coal plant interests.

Jon Wellinghoff is not being shy about his vision for power supply. The new chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a big promoter of the smart grid, demand response and renewables, believes the US may never see another new nuclear or coal plant.

The question right now may be no more than theoretical, he said at a United States Energy Association press briefing this morning, since costs are too high -- nuclear costs he cited as roughly $7,000/kW and advanced coal as similarly daunting. But even in the long term, Wellinghoff suggested, these traditional baseload sources may just not be needed.

In fact, our colleague Chris Newkumet reports, Wellinghoff said the very notion of baseload capacity may be "an anachronism."

As President Barack Obama and some of his White House staff send more and more signals that they are open to negotiating away from insistence on auctioning all CO2 emission allowances, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is doing the same. Maybe some of her motivation comes from a little gift from Jennings Randolph.

Randolph was a gracious, old-school Democratic lawmaker from West Virginia, who with Vermont Senator Robert Stafford led the Environment and Public Works Committee back in the 1980s with that kind of comity that hardly exists any more. Of different parties, they really did appear to work together to find ways of living productively together. According to a Washington Post column today, Randolph gave Pelosi's father something a long time ago that she still keeps in her office: a little statue of a coal miner.

The Clinton administration launched a big crackdown on coal-fired power plants at the end of the 1990s, and the lawsuits it filed against a host of power companies played out in various ways through the Bush administration. So-called new source review provisions of the Clean Air Act were the subject, and Bush officials, while they pursued the suits and settlements, did not have their hearts in it.

But it looks as though the assault is back, some say. One former Environmental Protection Agency official told our colleague Alex Duncan this week that up to 30 power plants could be targeted. One industry attorney, Richard Alonso of Bracewell & Giuliani, said it sounds as though government prosecutors "are starting out where they left off in 2000. Everybody's nervous about it, obviously."

Carbon capture and sequestration, i.e. clean coal: reality, many say. If so, when? An American Electric Power executive got a bit of questioning today in Houston about that.

AEP is burning coal at a 20-MW pilot facility in West Virginia, and capturing the carbon dioxide with a chilled ammonia process, then burying it on site. The next step, said Nick Akins, executive vice president of generation, is to bump up the generation capacity to 235 MW in 2011 or 2012. CCS will probably be widely deployed after 2020, he told the McCloskey coal conference associated with Cambridge Energy Research Associates' enormous annual conference.

But he got questions about that 2020 date.

The coal war is escalating.

Maybe it's everywhere else, too, or maybe it's here in Washington because this is the center of the interest-group and decision-maker universe. Whatever the case, if you're here you can't get away from it, and who the heck would have thought just a little while ago that the merits and demerits of coal would confront ordinary people - not just policymakers and energy writers, but everybody -- at every turn?

Granted, we do get assaulted with all kinds of stuff that's hardly likely to show up in other places, like billboards promoting fighter planes made by one contractor or another, for heaven's sake. As though most of us on the Metro had something to do with awarding the contract. But then, if even two of us have something to do with it, I guess it's worth the expense. But geez, the anti-clean-coal "Reality" campaign is just bashing us subway riders over the head.

Lots of people want lots of things from the upcoming economic stimulus package. A new idea came today from Tennessee Representative Zach Wamp, who suggests that possibly the package could include some aid to clean up localities damaged by the Tennessee Valley Authority's massive coal ash spill.

TVA itself is talking about insurance, the extent of which is unclear at the moment, and aggrieved parties are filing lawsuits for damages. But according to Wamp, who plans to run for governor of his state, the spill at TVA's Kingston coal-burning plant is much like Hurricane Katrina, a weather event, and thus federal aid should be made available to the state and county.

Whether Dynegy's Bruce Williamson did it just for sheer relief, or not, his separation from the plant-building joint venture with LS Power can't help but lift from him what must have been a big headache.

In today's announcement that the companies were callilng off the JV, Dynegy said it was ceding to LS the ownership and development rights to several coal-fired projects. But it was not necessarily giving up participation in two coal projects that are under construction -- Plum Point in Arkansas and Sandy Creek in Texas. It might get out of those projects, but for now it is "continuing to reevaluate" them.

The coal projects have caused nothing but grief for Dynegy and Williamson, who in December won the distinguished "corporate Scrooge" award from Co-Op America for exhibiting among "the worst kinds of unbridled greed and a lack of compassion or concern for others over the last year."

The Tennessee Valley Authority's coal ash spill, besides lending more life to the clean-coal wars, will almost certainly move the issue of handling coal combustion products much further up the Environmental Protection Agency's list than it would have been.

Environmentalists and the utility industry have been fighting for a long time over the rules for so-called CCP disposal. Early this year the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group told EPA that environmental groups' call for regulation under the hazardous-waste title of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was unnecessary.