Goodbye, Blue Sky: Coal Use Will Keep Going Up

(MoneyWatch)  President Obama has rolled over for politicians in coal states, and the coal industry is free to keep growing for at least a decade, the LA Times reports. But environmentalists still have hope of bringing down coal someday. At some point, emissions caps will force coal use to decline, especially if alternatives begin to catch up in price, right?

The answer is perhaps yes, but probably no. As it stands today, the Waxman-Markey climate bill looks to stay soft on coal. Emissions will be trimmed from other parts of the economy, and the cuts that are taken from coal won't be enough to make other energy sources preferable on a pricing basis. For now, coal use is going up.

One odd fact that's not being mentioned is that after 2020, when the amount of energy we get from coal may level off (with nuclear beginning to account for growth), the actual amount of coal used could still head up. That's because the carbon capture and sequestration technologies that the government is hoping to phase in at that point actually reduce the amount of energy you get per ton of coal burned. Scrubbing for emissions takes energy; so a plant that burned, say, 100 tons of coal a day before the switch, could burn 130 tons a day afterward, with the same energy output.

This scenario might be tolerable for the sort of environmentalist who's worried about global warming, but will likely further incense the kind that's unhappy about mountaintop removal and other harsh coal mining tactics.

For now, it looks like hopes of getting rid of the coal industry have been crushed, and more. If Waxman-Markey passes, lawsuits by environmentalists to keep coal plants from going ahead could be restricted, creating a new boom in plant building. And there's little hope of carbon prices going high enough to discourage coal. In Europe, carbon permits at $40 per ton of CO2 didn't dissuade the coal industry. In the United States, it's a long road even to that figure.