Sam, Future of Coal

This article is about the future of coal as a viable natural resource in our countries future. Recently coal has been touted as America’s saving grace. Obviously many of us have seen the recent advertising campaign on TV claiming coal is America’s fuel. But this article is questioning the reality of that claim. According to the article, coal is on the decline. One of the largest arguments against tapping into the coal reserves is that of environmental safety. Burning coal causes a very large amount of pollutants and recent concerns about climate change. This is causing a bit of a dilemma. America, today, is struggling to meet its electricity demands; the California blackouts are a good indicator that it may be time to enhance the system. The North American Electric Reliability Corp. says that if action is not take in the next year or two we probably wont have enough electricity ten years from now. There has been an attempt to build a clean burning coal power plant, dubbed the FutureGen plant, but rising costs may result in the cancellation of the project. The last major struggle that the coal advocates have to deal with is transportation. About 40% of the nations coal comes from one location, and thus, the transit around this location is vary important. In order to transport all the needed coal to the planned power plants, hundreds of millions of dollars will have to be invested in railroads.

I looked up the FutureGen plant to see how they planned to create a low emission coal plant. It turns out that the plant was cancelled yesterday, citing the massively inflated cost. The plant was originally going to cost just under a billion but the cost increased to about 1.8 billion. The plant was supposed to capture its emissions and bury them in capsules deep under ground, producing no emissions in the air and producing hydrogen and electricity. That hydrogen could then have been used in fuel cells.

I think that the issue of coal power is actually a very pressing concern for the American people. We need to either increase our energy production fast that it seems possible right now, or lower our usage. Between 2001 and 2006 about 30% of the energy produced in the world was produced by coal. Sadly, none of these coal plants are low emission and therefore pose a significant threat to our environment. America has about 200 years worth of coal reserves, and yet there is a good chance that these reserves will never be tapped, as they are too dangerous to the environment and we lack the infrastructure to operate the amount of plants that we need to build. I think that the decision to leap forward in coal use was a rash one. Granted we do need the energy, but it is absolutely critical that we develop new methods of getting our energy that do not cause permanent damage to the environment.


Pasterna, Judy. Coal is No Longer on the Front Burner. LA Times. Friday, January 18th. 2008. Pp A8+A21.