My Republican congressman, David McKinley, who defeated the thoroughly contemptible blue dog Mike Oliverio, has been making quite the use of his Franking privilege, and every so often I get a flyer from him. McKinley is a conservative, but so far he has not done anything insane, and by the current standards for Republican behavior, he’s really covered himself with glory. He hasn’t shown up on Hardball to demand to see Obama’s birth certificate or yelled “YOU LIE” during the State of the Union, he hasn’t pushed for secession or written letters accusing state department employees of terrorism, or any of that. He’s actually been the way Congressmen should be, which is quiet and boring.
At any rate, he had a survey on the back of the flyer that he wanted me to mail back (I didn’t), and he asked what the most important issues were. The choices were job creation, balance the budget, stop illegal immigration, and a couple others, but my favorite of the suggested issues was “stopping the war on coal.” You know what is waging war against coal? The free market:
RAZ: If you’re looking for the best biscuits for miles around, head to the hilltop diner in Cowen, population 512. Thick slices of bacon and homemade potatoes sizzle on the grill as the early risers down mugs of strong coffee.
Steve Williams is a retired mining engineer. He’s catching up on the latest news with his regular breakfast crew this morning. Ask any of them what’s killing coal and the answer is unequivocal.
STEVE WILLIAMS: President Obama’s a lot of the problem because he’s against the coal. The EPA is the big problem around here.
RAZ: This past March, the EPA announced tough new standards that require all new coal-fired electricity plants to cut carbon emissions by half. It’s an expensive proposition and it’s led many power companies to back away from coal.
But to get to the heart of what is really killing coal, you have to go about 500 miles south to Atlanta, Georgia. This is one of Georgia Power Company’s newest power plants in metro Atlanta.
TONY TRAMONTE: Two gas turbines…
RAZ: And the plant manager, Tony Tramonte, is duly proud of it.
TRAMONTE: Eight hundred and forty megawatts. That’s enough energy to supply about 250,000 homes.
RAZ: Just a year ago, railroad tracks led right into this facility. Rail cars filled with coal to power the massive turbines, but today, those railroad tracks are gone, dismantled, the old coal turbines mothballed. Georgia Power, like a rapidly growing number of power plants, is ditching coal and burning natural gas and the reason? Cheap and abundant domestic gas. Four years ago, electricity generated by natural gas was twice as expensive as coal, but today, gas is less than half the price of coal.
MICHAEL ZENKER: And what that means is, literally, natural gas is going to kill more coal-fired power plants than the EPA regulations.
RAZ: That’s Michael Zenker. He’s a coal analyst for Barclays. Last month, for the first time in U.S. history, natural gas generated a third of all U.S. electricity the same as coal, and Zenker says that trend is going to continue. The recent advances in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the process by which gas can now be extract deep under rock formations, has brought about a huge surplus in U.S. gas.
Plant managers aren’t wed to coal out of nostalgia or loyalty to Appalachia. They used coal because it was the cheapest way to generate electricity. Now, it isn’t, and probably never again will be, so they are moving on. That is what is killing coal. As he is a businessman, I’d have thought Rep. McKinley supported the free market.
Phil Perspective
Plant managers aren’t wed to coal out of nostalgia or loyalty to Appalachia. They used coal because it was the cheapest way to generate electricity. Now, it isn’t, and probably never again will be, so they are moving on. That is what is killing coal.
Thanks for pointing this out. It can’t be said enough. The EPA hasn’t done shit. And neither has the DOL. NatGas is cheap as hell right now. Super cheap. If anyone tells you PBO is killing King Coal, automatically know they are full of crap.
scav
To a True Believer(tm), the Free Market(tm), Like God(tm) supports whatever its True Believers dictate.
jwb
@Phil Perspective: The turn to natural gas is also helping greatly with the green house gas emissions. There’s just that sucky problem of that all this surplus of gas is being produced by fracking.
burnspbesq
He’s a Republican. Republicans are only in favor of the free market when it yields outcomes they like.
lacp
So instead of blowing off the tops of mountains, they’ve moved on to poisoning the water supply through fracking. The Free Market! Is there anything it cant’ do?
cathyx
He supports the free market only if it gives to his campaign.
Face
I think what’s killing coal is college football.
Bulworth
–Make the womenz go back home
–No abortion
–Less Government
–US out of UN
–Freedom
jwb
@lacp: That’s the invisible hand showing its powers of transubstantiation.
Ben Cisco
Reads just like the “Obama’s comin’ fer awr gunzzzz” business – truth reveals anything but.
On that note: Out of the D and R candidates for President, the NRA is supporting the one (and ONLY one, mind you) that has actually signed gun control legislation into law, and is opposing the candidate that signed legislation EXPANDING it.
I learned that here – I’d h/t but I cannot remember who said it. Thanks Balloon Juice!
Redshift
And that is the one thing that gives me hope about a major changeover to renewable energy. Arguably, solar is now actually cheaper than coal or natural gas (thought I’m not sure if that takes into account the recent declines in the cost of natural gas), and the only thing making it more expensive is that we have a lot of installed base and infrastructure, and solar, being intermittent and not on-demand, can’t just plug in and completely replace current sources without modifying the existing power grid.
But the reason I have hope is that fundamentally, power companies only care about what’s cheapest. Oil companies and coal companies care a lot about pushing their products, but nobody who uses them cares about anything other than the cost of the fuel and the cost of switching.
Rob in CT
@lacp:
I worry about pollution from fracking operations, really, but I strongly suspect that fracking + burning Nat. Gas vs. mining and burning coal is a win.
Rob in CT
@Redshift:
Solar isn’t that cheap yet, I don’t think. The panels have come waaaay down in price, which is great. But you still have to pay to have them installed. Even heavily subsidized, it’s expensive and you’re looking at a ~10 year break-even point. [for a PV array on your roof. If you are looking at data for a solar power plant, I may be way off]
the Conster
@Ben Cisco:
I used that on FB – it surprised me and it prompted some interesting comments. It is the height of irony that the best things Romney ever did – passing health care reform and an assault weapons ban – he has to run away from and pretend they never happened, along with a big chunk of his tenure at Bain. I’m going to make sure that I keep mentioning that Romney has been more effective at passing progressive legislation than Obama, and that maybe the NRA is just another Republican front group exploiting gun nuts to push tax cuts for millionaires.
jibeaux
So mail it back with that helpful information.
We have a lot of drama in NC over Progress Energy being bought out by Duke Power. I won’t bore you with the details, but it makes me want to slather my house in solar panels and quit paying a dime to either one of them.
Redshift
@jwb: Well, maybe. I’ve read some research that natural gas isn’t nearly as good as we’ve been led to believe because a lot leaks out into the atmosphere during extraction, and methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. It’s better than coal, but it may not be a lot better.
(It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s possible to improve the extraction methods to help with this problem, but unfortunately, the Invisible Hand won’t be on our side in that fight.)
jl
Besides fracking, I think a lot of recent investment in natural gas has been due to relatively long term hedges on fossil fuel prices from mid 2000s. As I understand it, long term contract price of natural gas much higher than spot price. And I think some of those long term contracts were, over the long term, suspected to be ‘loss leaders’ packaged with oil development deals.
Hard to see new investment at current spot prices, and as soon as long term contracts expire, natural gas might not be so cheap anymore.
But, not an expert, and maybe got it wrong. No time to go look up right now. Maybe some one who knows about natural gas industry will come along.
Anyway, not sure natural gas prices will stay at current lows for long.
mikeyes
Are you sure he didn’t mean the “War on Cole?”
horatius
Maybe he’s too dumb to even make a fool of himself.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
This is happening locally: Salem’s old coal-fired power plant is going offline in 2014, to be replaced with a gas-fired one shortly afterwards (2016). And this was all done on economic grounds: It’s just too expensive to upgrade the current 60-year old plant up to modern standards.
The gas plant would not only be cleaner, but would also only take up 1/3rd of the acreage of the current site on Salem Harbor, freeing up the other 2/3rds for potential redevelopment. Suggestions have ranged from a new pier for mid-sized cruise ships (of the “booze cruise” class), a test farm for windmills, a public park, and a marine biology facility. This being Salem, I’m sure it will stay a brown site while we squabble about it for 20 years… but at least they’re talking about it.
Ironically, it’s the politics getting in the way this time. Reps from other parts of the State aren’t too happy at certain terms that were negotiated, claiming that it might raise rates for other customers (though there’s no proof of this).
japa21
@Ben Cisco: But you don’t realize. By not doing anything to control guns, Obama is just setting us up for his second term when he will take all the guns away. Romney, on the other hand, signed the assault weapon ban in order to make us libruls think he was in favor of gun contol. Then once he is President he will sign an executive order overturning all gun control laws at the Federal State and local levels.
Redshift
@Rob in CT: The figures I’ve read are the just cost of a watt of electricity, so the size of the problem with the cost of infrastructure is will vary depending on whether you’re talking about power-plant level (less) or decentralized (more.)
But the key is that we used to be talking about environmental benefits being worth the extra cost of solar, and now we don’t actually have to talk about that, and it’s only going to get better. We have a hell of a lot of infrastructure geared to existing sources, but we are actually now at a point where, if we were starting from scratch, nobody would install anything but wind, solar, and hydro based on cost. That really is a major shift.
(Here’s one of the references I remember reading. Good stuff.)
The Moar You Know
Congresscritters support the high bidder of the market they represent.
So long as coal is burned anywhere in the world, at any price, W.VA will be represented by coal money – since that’s pretty much y’all have to sell.
jl
Was going to say that modern big energy projects involve long term investment of very specialized capital, and the fossil fuels go into a vertical system of long term capital infrastructure that is often not flexible in terms of substitution, except at high cost unless flexibility planned up front.
So, this fixed capital set up is exactly area where unregulated free market magic capitalism runs into problems. Economics could not sort those problems out, and then attention drifted to financial markets, and now assumptions seems to be that financial markets will take care of any problems.
So, that is your happy happy news for today from economics.
chopper
The war on coal is being waged by coal itself. The tertiary shit we’re digging up and burning these days is garbage. Lots of water, sulfur, heavy metals. The shit was hard to burn efficiently before an new fangled restrictions went into place.
jl
@The Moar You Know:
” So long as coal is burned anywhere in the world, at any price, W.VA will be represented by coal money – since that’s pretty much y’all have to sell. ”
Well, you got your ramps, ginseng, and and fine hard woods.
Edit: no jokes please connecting ‘fine hard wood’ and Cole.
gene108
@japa21:
Preach it Japa21. The truth hurts liberal brains!
Hahahahahahahahaha…(/snark)
Svensker
Send the survey back. Cross out their bullshit stuff and write what you care about.
If you don’t ’em, who will?
Punchy
Translation: he’s a n#gger.
The Moar You Know
@japa21: Oh, I see someone else also gets the NRA shitsheets.
It’s funny until you realize that this is literally word for word what they are telling their members.
Roger Moore
@mikeyes:
No, that’s being waged by an irregular force of mops, icy sidewalks, chunks of frozen meat, and misbehaving pets. Besides, it’s only of interest to weirdo progressives on some fool’s blog, and they’re in favor of the War on Cole because of its comedic potential.
japa21
@The Moar You Know: I know. I should have put the snark line in.
muddy
@jibeaux:
That’s just what you should do. Print out your post, staple it to the card, and send it to him. It’s not likely he reads your blog. It probably won’t make a difference, but it’s more than doing nothing at all.
I never get the chance to bitch out my Congress peeps, sigh. I do write to them saying, “Good for you! Proud you are representing me!” periodically, I figure they probably don’t get many of those.
Ruviana
John! Did you read that Chris Hedges book that your friend ordered? When I read the chapter on coal in West Virginia yesterday I said to myself, “I should somehow send this to Cole.” Worth a read.
Ben Cisco
@japa21: BWAHAAHAA!!
That’s some hi-quality wingnut right there.
Bighorn Ordovican Dolomite
@Rob in CT:
Basically speaking: and how. Fracking may have some problems (it does) but they absolutely pale in comparison to what coal has done to humans life, health, society and the environment.
Basically speaking the only things that humans have come up with that is more destructive than mining and burning coal is outright warfare.
R-Jud
@jl:
You mean the stuff between his ears, or the stuff they’ve replaced all his knuckles with every time he’s broken a finger?
Chris Gerrib
Not only is natural gas cheaper, but I suspect gas turbine plants are cheaper to run. Coal-fired plants use steam under very high pressure (600 PSI, 1200 degrees F) which means expensive pipe fittings, more repair labor and more people to run them.
lacp
@jwb: or maybe giving us all the finger…
muddy
@Bighorn Ordovican Dolomite: Unless it turns out they destroy all the drinking water.
trollhattan
To be fair, we don’t yet know the costs and impacts of natural gas flyash slurry being suddenly released into rivers. Oh, wait.
“Peaking” plants have been coming on line in California and are necessarily natural gas. Coal can’t be configured to fire up rapidly in response to demand spikes (not that you could build a coal plant here, because we declared war on coal. What, you didn’t see the headlines?)
Coal is dirty, dirty, dirty–from extraction to processing to transportation to use to disposal. It’s a third-world fuel the developed nations refuse to abandon.
japa21
@Ben Cisco: Unfortunately, 27% of the population believes it.
El Cid
It’s also easier to transport natural gas and to feed it through systems than, say, rocks.
Litlebritdifrnt
Romney’s “you didn’t build that” attack ad against POTUS features a guy who has taken millions in government loans and contracts. You can’t make this shit up.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/star-of-romney-my-hands-didnt-build-this-ad-received-millions-in-government-loans-and-contracts/
HyperIon
@Redshift wrote:
True but it doesn’t hang around nearly as long as CO2.
So once we discover the error of our carbon-based fuel ways (ha!), the atmospheric methane conc will fall, assuming no other sources (ha-ha!).
But the high carbon dioxide levels are going to screw us for hundreds of years. That stuff stays up there a VERY long time.
El Cid
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Oh, so now nobody can make shit up if the gubmit don’t do it for ’em?
TG Chicago
OT: is Kthug calling out George Will?
I have a feeling those two instances of “will” could be read as “Will”.
Litlebritdifrnt
@El Cid:
I love his justification
Roy G.
Barclays? Hmmmm, where have I heard that name lately? Oh yeah, they put the ‘lie’ in LIBOR.
Bighorn Ordovican Dolomite
@muddy:
No even then. Coal has killed millions of people in its mining, (and continues to kill thousands a year in countries like China) and indirectly contributes to untold thousands/millions by aggravating respiratory ailments, again take a look at what China went through with the Beiljing Olympics. And then there is the way burning coal REALLY contributest to global warming and who can even estimate how many lives that will ruin/end.
Mining coal is in no way benign towards ground or surface water. I have yet to see any studies that are relly conclusive on fracking’s impacts on water.
I don’t think fracking is a miracle by any means, but coal is so horrible we need to stop using it ASAP.
For the record, my preference would be improved conservation, followed by renewable energy to the greatest extent possible, and only then go with natural gas as we phase out coal.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Litlebritdifrnt: Yeah, his belief is that the amount of tax money he has paid in over his lifetime >> than the money used for all of the services and infrastructure he has benefited from, so there’s some of that left over for him to use.
FlipYrWhig
@Litlebritdifrnt: This is consistently the Republican view. What they get from the government they earned by toil and sweat, unlike Those People, you know the ones, who got stuff from the government by sitting on their butts. Talk to any Republican and it is sure to come up within minutes.
FlipYrWhig
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): I don’t think it’s supposed to check out in terms of raw math, but in terms of a sort of ethical-moral balance sheet. “I did all the right things, working hard and playing by the rules, so I EARNED what the government gave me. Other People just want a handout.”
Mnemosyne
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Yes, one of my all-time favorites: “I built this company from the ground up with no help from the government! Except for all of the government loans and contracts I received!”
Merryl
While I’m glad to see coal being phased out anywhere it’s happening, I’m actually quite a bit less bully on seeing it replaced by natural gas, if it’s coming from fracking. A friend recently asked me about shale gas, and we wound up doing some digging–this paper is the latest in an article-response-reply to response chain, and it’s saying that with the methane released when starting the well, as well as leaks during transportation, shale gas is right up there with coal in terms of GHG warming potential. http://www.springerlink.com/content/c338g7j559580172/fulltext.html
On the one hand, I’m glad to see less CO2 going into the atmosphere, since it lasts so much longer, but with the math from the Rolling Stone article Cole linked last week, I’m not really sure that having stronger short-term warming from methane is going to help us; we’re already perilously close to exceeding the allowed carbon budget for the 2-degree warming window.
On the other hand, having natural gas force down the price of all the fossil fuel assets the big energy companies have on their books is one way to reduce the amount of leverage (money) they’ve got….I dunno, I just can’t shake the feeling that we’re boned either way. We need to transition to solar and wind ASAP, but I still don’t see a clear path to get from here to there.
foodriots
When do these food riots you’ve been talking about start Cole? I’ve been looking all over the place for them. One of the half dozen McD’s near me ran out of mango smoothie mix today. Is that an early sign? Should I start stocking the fallout shelter buried in my backyard?
pseudonymous in nc
@jibeaux:
Progress actually has (perhaps “had” now?) a thing where you could sell power back to the grid from your own PV solar install. Means filling in a few dozen forms, but they do pay up. Anyway, who knows what’s going to happen under Statewide Monopoly Electricity, other than the consumers get fucked.
One reason why Thatcher could go to war against the miners’ unions in Britain was because North Sea oil and gas provided the backstop that made mines “uneconomical”. And that was a situation where mineworkers were in a better position than the ones in Appalachia.
El Cid
@Litlebritdifrnt: So, he’s limited to government contracts which amount to the total federal taxes he’s paid in his lifetime?
I bet a single one of those contracts he achieved exceeds that entirely.
gopher2b
“pushed for secession” …. have you really thought through opposing that. Oh, right, you live there. Sorry.
Satchel
He’s actually been the way Congressmen should be …
“Members of Congress”? “Representatives”?
Herbal Infusion Bagger
It used to be that there’d be a peak in Natural Gas prices in the winter at $12/MM BTU.
Now, natural gas is cheap, cheap, cheap, and the zombie coal plants that can’t meet the SO2 or even the mercury emissions standards are being mothballed, wheras before they could beg for exemptions based on natural gas turbine electricity being too expensive.
This is the primary reason to support fracking – it puts dirty coal plants out of business.
There won’t be another conventional coal-fired electricity plant built in the U.S. They cost 3.5 times the capital cost per kilowatt of natural gas combined cycle plants, and they’re less efficient to boot. You might see an integrated-gasification combined cycle plant, but I doubt it.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
There’s still the possibility of coal bed methane from W.Va., and metallurgical coal. Don’t know how much of W.Va coal is anthracite, though.
mainmati
@pseudonymous in nc: Yeah, I was living in GB during the Thatcher era and the miners were far more powerful and waged a long and bitter war against Thatchers’ government. The NUM’s (the union) president, Arthur Scargill, had as one of his strategists a young American woman (interesting, eh?).
Anyway, you have made the point that I was going to make, i.e. that conservatives absolutely hate democracy and especially economically empowering the little guy. Yes, they talk about small business all the time but they are really dependent upon big corporations, especially King Coal and Big Oil, the Koch Bros. and similar.
Renewables offer the promise of distributed, autonomous power generation and selling power back to the grid has actually been around for decades. It’s true that the poor and the working and even most of the middle class doesn’t have the capital to install renewables (solar, wind, micro-hydro or the quasi-geothermal) but a lot of money can be saved also through investments in building/home energy conservation. The “non-existent” climate change is going to force these changes anyway.
The Other Chuck
@the Conster:
I’m not sure that’s even the case. I think their macho posturing simply demands a ceaseless stream of screaming spittle-flecked spiteful rage against absolutely anyone who doesn’t wake up every morning and beat their children within an inch of their life followed by driving a sherman tank to work where they break rocks with their bare knuckles because they’re MANLY SORT OF FREEDOM MEN.
Thus they have to hate democrats. Even if Obama turned the national mall into a big shooting range. Because that’s just what manly men do.
EIGRP
@foodriots: Please send your exact street address so we can determine the food supply availability in your neck of the woods. Then, we will tell you to start stocking up.
Eric
Tripod
The issue for Appalachian coal is the increasing cost of production as the quality fields are played out. The region had become a swing producer on the global market even before NG power generation.
Mutt
Natural gas is only “cheaper” if the costs of poisoned water tables- from fracking, which is why we have so much natural gas all of a sudden-is shifted away from the gas sellers and on to the taxpayers/water users. In other words, the ACTUAL costs are socialized- Republican Socialism- and the profits privatized. See what it costs if the trackers are responsible for the water. I just came back from Montana, via N Dakota- historic levels of extreme drought and wildfire. BILLION and BILLIONS of gallons are being pumped out of thje aquifer- which EVERYONE depends on- to provide water for tracking. Like coal and oil, the actual costs prepaid by citizens, while the profits end up sipping pina coladas in the Caymans…..
Teejay
… and you didn’t respond to your congressman because…..?