Tim Kenworthy
nailed it when he labeled a Tuesday hearing of the Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee of the House Committee on Natural Resources a Republican "love-in for western coal."
That's the low-sulfur coal of the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana that began to be seriously developed in the late 1970s. About 40 percent of the coal mined in the United States now comes from the basin. Nearly all of it is strip-mined from leases on public and tribal lands overseen by the Department of Interior and Bureau of Land Management. The basin is dominated by four companies: Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal, Inc., Cloud Peak Energy and Peabody Energy. Altogether, the Powder River coal operations have payrolls of about 15,000 workers.
Subcommittee Chairman Doug Lamborn, who represents the ultra-conservative 5th district of Colorado, said at the two-hour hearing, during which climate change was not on the agenda, “The United States has the world’s largest coal reserves. It would be the height of folly to throw this resource away.” In a prepared statement, Lamborn complained:
[W]ith the onslaught of new regulations [a]ffecting the operation of coal-fired power plants, some of which require technology that has not yet been invented or that may never be commercially available, the abundant coal resources from the Powder River Basin and elsewhere around the country may grind to a halt.
Grinding to a halt is precisely what needs to happen as quickly as possible. Some 28 percent of U.S. carbon emissions come from coal, ninth-tenths of that used to generate electricity. A 2011 Harvard study,
Full Cost Accounting for the Full Lifecycle of Coal, put the hidden costs of coal—many of them health related—at $345 billion annually. That's more than the coal itself costs.
The U.S. trend is against coal-fired power plants, many of them being replaced by natural gas turbines. Government forecasters say some 175 coal-fired units are expected to be closed by 2018, accounting for nearly 9 percent of the total U.S. electricity generated by burning coal. Nationwide, coal production fell nearly 7 percent in 2012, to 1.02 billion tons. That heads us in the right direction.
But while we're burning less coal at home, exports are on the rise, 125 million tons of them in 2012, a figure that some forecasters say could double in five years. About a fourth of those exports now go to Asia where the trend is for building more coal-fired power plants even though the rate of growth of new coal plants there has slowed. That means domestic coal production could rise while domestic coal burning falls.
Over the past two years, the Obama administration has issued coal leases on public land for about two billion tons of coal, most of it in the Powder River Basin. And, despite the president's long-awaited, much-belated speech on climate change last month, leases for another four billion tons are ready to be signed. As recently noted by a report from inspector general of the Department of Interior, those leases, most of them obtained in one-bid deals, rip off the taxpayers for millions each year.
That has to stop. Not just the rip-offs, but the leasing itself. It would be the height of folly not to leave that coal in the ground.