The Rising Price of Coal

As the global energy/climate crisis deepens, coal has become the starkest symbol and most telling measure of our predicament. Coal produces more carbon emissions than other energy sources – more than twice that of natural gas per unit of energy output. Consequently, coal-fired power plants are responsible for about one-third of US emissions of carbon dioxide. Despite this, we are mining and burning more coal than ever.

But as demand for electricity rises and cleaner fuels like natural gas get scarcer and more expensive, the relentless pressure to burn coal fuels delusions such as “clean coal.”
At the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference in Eugene, Oregon, in early March, a panel of citizen activists talked about the front and back ends of coal use: mining and waste disposal. Teri Blanton, of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth spoke about the heartbreak of mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. The mining technique is dynamiting hundreds of thousand of acres of biologically diverse forest ecosystems to get at the coal underneath, and dumping the waste into streams. Blanton told the story of one of her neighbors who lost his land to a mining company. “When I say he lost his land,” she said, “I mean he literally lost his land. One day he found that his land was just gone, blasted away to nothing.”

According to the group Appalachian Voices, more than 800 square miles of mountains have already been destroyed by mountaintop removal and if the blasting continues unabated it will devastate an area the size of Delaware by 2010.

Coal mining also uses great quantities of water and pollutes streams in the process. Slurries of waste laden with toxic heavy metals are leaching into streams and river systems. Earthen impoundments that hold back the sludge are unstable and threaten communities. A sludge dam breach in 2000 in Martin County, Kentucky, dumped more than 300 million gallons of toxic sludge, killing virtually all aquatic life for 70 miles downstream of the spill.

American electricity consumers are used to hearing that coal is much cheaper than renewable alternatives like solar and wind, but that might not be true for long. Consumers haven’t seen the impact of expensive coal yet because most utilities lock in coal supplies with long-term contracts. Electricity rates will begin to shoot upwards when those contracts expire in the years ahead.

There is no chance that prices will come back down again either, because Peak Coal, like Peak Oil, is fast approaching. Journalist David Strahan, in a January 17 article for New Scientist, has documented what’s known about coal reserves. He concludes that the official figures, like the official figures for recoverable oil reserves, have been vastly inflated.

Scoop