Natural Gas and Coal duking it out in Colorado. Gas comes and goes, coal builds communities
NPR produced a story yesterday about the fight over electricity fuel market share between natural gas and coal. Interestingly enough, both fuels have been extracted for many years from the same area in Northern Colorado. The NPR story provides some voices of real people that share their views of the effects of the market battle on their way of life.
Mr. DOYLE MANN (Employee, Peabody Colorado Coal): Because we have a vast amount of coal reserves just right here in Northwest Colorado.
SIEGLER: Seated in their modest kitchen in Craig, Tisha and Doyle Mann say the natural gas companies have come and gone over the years. Many of this area’s gas rigs recently moved to new finds in the Northeast. So they feel lucky that Doyle has a steady job working underground at Peabody Coal’s mine nearby.
Ms. MANN: This is our way of life, you know. This is what we came to Craig for. It’s made us a good living. It’s made a good family. We’re – I’d hate to see, you know, any of that go away.
If you are interested in an inside view from a convention of natural gas supporters, please take the time to watch the video titled COLORADO CLEAN AIR-CLEAN JOBS ACT PANEL that is available at the Energy Epicenter 2010 web site.
Make no mistake, only part of the underlying motives in this battle have anything to do with the effect on the environment. A major part of the effort has been all about ensuring that there is sufficient market demand for natural gas to keep the prices high enough to support an extremely profitable industry that often treats its hosts a bit like the way insensitive young guys treat women they meet at a bar.
For all of its environmental challenges – many of which can be overcome with application of known technology – coal is more like the steady fellow who meets his girl at a community picnic and makes a lifelong commitment.
The NPR story contains a warning for all those who earn a steady living from coal and for the communities that the coal mines have built in the 150 years years that it has been a major fuel source in the United States.
SIEGLER: Environmentalists, who have long fought to shut down coal-fired plants, agree.
Pam Keily of the group Environment Colorado says the impacts to the state’s coal industry will be negligible because most of Colorado’s coal is exported. But she has a broader agenda.
(Emphasis added.)Ms. PAM KEILY (Legislative director, Environment Colorado): What we’re doing in Colorado is a preface to what will hopefully be a national transformation around our electricity sector. And is coal really the answer for the future?
That is music to the natural gas industry’s ears. Thomas Price must be grinning from ear to ear about now.
Hmmm, I find it touching that an atomic energy blog apparently cares so much about the jobs and economy of Colorado coal miners and coal towns. *grin*
I’m not sure I understand what your horse in this race is, Rod? Other than, perhaps, to get the industries which fight against Nuclear to fight more against each other and less against Nuclear?
@Jeff – first of all, I hope you have read enough on Atomic Insights and in the comments to understand that I am a pretty complicated guy with a variety of interests. One of them is an interest in building strong communities. I have been blessed with the opportunity to have lived in a number of great places around the US and worked with a lot of terrific people and groups. American middle class people who work hard at steady jobs with decent wages or salaries and are raising families are fun to be around. They have worked up to a reasonably comfortable part of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Over the past few months, as I moved away from the coast and closer to the Appalachian mountains, I have become acquainted with a guy who installs communication systems at coal mines. He is a qualified underground miner and quite proud of that designation. He has helped me to understand a bit more about the industry, the people, and the history. Neither one of us is in favor of blowing up mountains in order to use machines to quickly extract the material and move on, but I am gaining a much better appreciation for the importance of careful extraction of valuable raw material.
I have never been anti-coal; I have criticized some current techniques and criticized “cheap” methods of burning that are really half-assed systems that do not capture or control contaminants and waste products. I have often suggested ways to upgrade the value of coal at the mines so that the processing systems add opportunity and help to reduce dependence on rail transportation. I have written several times about my friend who wants to use high temperature process heat to produce a clean diesel fuel from coal – http://www.liquidcoal.com.
Of course, there is also the tactical argument that you alluded to – divide and conquer is not a bad way to overcome some of the resource imbalance between my effort to force nuclear back into the rational conversation about our energy future and the effort of the oil&gas industry to claim that “clean natural gas” is so available and cheap that we do not need to build many nuclear plants any time soon. (It is hard for a thousandair to do battle with a multi trillion dollar business without some kind of alliances.) 🙂
Rod, thanks for the reply. Yes, I did realize that overall, you don’t care just about nuclear, but about what’s best for America, and that you want more people to have good middle-class-wage jobs. What I was confused about was what seemed like an article championing coal on an atomic energy blog.
I’ve come to the conclusion, too, that at least in the mid-term (say the next 50-100 years), it probably makes a lot of sense to combine increased building of nuclear plants with also building out IGCC+CCS coal plants. A big reason for this is that everywhere I look, people are saying that basically, right now, we just can’t build nuclear plants *fast enough* even if we want too, because the industry isn’t in a state to be able to do a big buildout. We are just sort of bottlenecked, and it will take a few decades to expand our capacity to build nuclear plants.
In the meantime, since we have a lot of coal in America (I’ve heard the U.S. described as the Saudi Arabia of Coal), let’s use it but, but use it with cleaner generators (which it sounds like you too agree with that idea), and cleaner extraction methods (I agree that I very much don’t like the idea of mountain-top removal and other highly destructive extraction methods).
Anyhow, thank you again for responding – it gives me a better understanding of who you are, and where you stand.
Personally, given that the gas men hide behind the delusion of renewable energy while the coal men do not, I think a “Beat Gas First” strategy may well be a good idea for supporters of nuclear energy, just as “Beat Germany First” was the correct Allied grand strategy in World War II.
LNG is traded internationally and at the present time we are shipping to the UK. It is not simply a local issue nor, for that matter, is global warming and climate change. We are producing an excess above our domestic market. As nuclear is closely regulated so should the other energy markets.
Russia will soon come online with LNG from Siberia and dominate as the number one exporter. When that happens in, three years time, the US market in natural gas will tumble. Gas comes and goes.
Mike, doesn’t that just reinforce the business case for LNG electric plants in the U.S.? E.g. new supply from Russia comes online, reducing international export demand, lowers the price of LNG domestically, which means it sells at a lower price point where it’s economical to use it for electricity?