The country's largest coal producing state is desperate to keep the struggling industry going. Wyoming is investing big to try to clean up coal's carbon emissions, even as many say it's too late.
The immediate problem with coal isn't the emissions or the waste produced, as much as its the fixed output of the plants that is of low value for much of the day - the plants cost more to run than they can make in electricity sales.
Coal is dying just like nuclear power - if it was the emissions that were killing the plants, then nuclear power would be winning. If you don't have a marketable product that you shouldn't be forcing consumers to buy it. The future is very low cost renewables, along with mid market natural gas turbines and especially peaking natural gas plants.
If coal can adapt to provide more mid market power than it has a brighter future - even without carbon sequestration. But getting coal to burn cleanly and reliability under mid market conditions is challenging - existing coal plant designs don't ramp well - and they pollute a lot more and suffer much higher breakdowns when they are forced to regularly change output. But if scientists can figure out how to make next generation plants ramp better than coal has a future at least in coal country, especially sited on existing facilities.
Thirty-two years ago, my interest in the oil price shocks of the 1970s took me to the University of California at Berkeley to study energy. That same year the Liquid Fuels Trust Board was established in New Zealand. The Board clearly saw lignite as the country’s future source of transport fuel. However, because lignite is poor quality coal, extracting energy from it creates particularly high emissions of carbon dioxide. My concern about this is not new. Twenty years ago I co-authored a report called Transport fuels in New Zealand after Maui – lignite on the back burner.
It now looks as if lignite is making its way to the front burner. Two companies, state owned enterprise Solid Energy and the L&M Group, are proposing to mine lignite in Otago and Southland and convert it to diesel. In addition, Solid Energy is proposing to make two more products from lignite: the nitrogen fertiliser urea, and briquettes (made by drying out lignite into a better form of coal) primarily for export. Using lignite for generating electricity is another possibility.
The foundation of this report is a set of carbon footprint calculations for these four uses of lignite – diesel, urea, briquettes, and electricity. These calculations are presented in as open and transparent a manner as possible. I ask those who may question these calculations to be equally transparent.
WASHINGTON — The United States is on track to produce more electricity this year from renewable power than from coal for the first time on record, new government projections show, a transformation partly driven by the coronavirus pandemic, with profound implications in the fight against climate change.
It is a milestone that seemed all but unthinkable a decade ago, when coal was so dominant that it provided nearly half the nation’s electricity. And it comes despite the Trump administration’s three-year push to try to revive the ailing industry by weakening pollution rules on coal-burning power plants.
Those efforts, however, failed to halt the powerful economic forces that have led electric utilities to retire hundreds of aging coal plants since 2010 and run their remaining plants less frequently. The cost of building large wind farms has declined more than 40 percent in that time, while solar costs have dropped more than 80 percent. And the price of natural gas, a cleaner-burning alternative to coal, has fallen to historic lows as a result of the fracking boom.
Now the coronavirus outbreak is pushing coal producers into their deepest crisis yet.