Achieving
lower energy costs is key to bringing jobs back to the US. Trump’s promise to
restore coal mining will likely result in the end of the “war on coal”.
Surviving
U.S. Power Plants Will Help Keep Coal Demand Steady, by Mario Parker 11/11/15,
Bloomberg
Utilities will retire
a record amount of coal power this year Existing power plants
will burn more as gas prices edge up. If you thought
that a record loss of U.S. coal-fired power generation means less of the climate-changing
fuel will be burned, think again.
Power plants with 23
gigawatts of coal-burning capacity will close this year as utilities strive to
meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency limits on mercury and other air
toxins, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The retirements are the most in a single year, according to
the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Still, America will
use 773 million tons of coal in 2016, the same as this year, as plants that
survive the regulatory shakeout use more of the fuel, the EIA said in its Short-Term Energy Outlook
Tuesday.
A “popular
misconception” is that coal has relinquished its title as the primary source of
electricity, said Ted O’Brien, Chief Executive Officer of Doyle Trading
Consultants, a Grand Junction, Colorado-based analytical firm. “One of the
biggest things that flies under the radar is the coal plants that survive,” run
continuously.
(See the graph in the
original article: It shows the coal-fired vs gas-fired shift: In 2005,
coal-fired power plants made up 50% and gas-fired was under 20%. By 2016, coal fired dropped to 35% and gas
rose to over 30%.)
Gas at or below $3 per
million British thermal units for most of 2015 has helped it top coal as the
primary fuel for power generation for three months this year. Cheap gas and
tighter environmental regulations led coal use to plummet 9.2 percent from 2014
to 2015. Coal use reached a record 1.05 billion tons in 2007.
When burned, coal
emits almost twice as much carbon dioxide, a pollutant blamed for global
warming, as gas, according to EIA. Prices for coal used in power generation are
expected to be little changed in 2016 from 2015, according to the EIA.
Stable Demand
The cleaner-burning
fuel may average $3.09 in 2016, about 12 percent more than the forecast for
this year on higher demand from the fertilizer and chemicals industries. That
will make coal more attractive to power producers. Gas averaged $4.52 in 2014.
“Higher forecast
natural gas prices in 2016 are expected to contribute to higher utilization
rates among the remaining coal-fired power plants, which partially offsets the
effect of coal-plant retirements,” the EIA said.
Coal will account for
34 percent of power consumption in 2016, little changed from this year,
compared with 31 percent for gas, EIA forecasts.
“You’ve got this big
wave of retirements that you don’t get for the rest of the decade,” James Stevenson, director of North American Coal at IHS Inc.
in Houston, said by phone Wednesday. “That means after this, coal demand is
pretty stable.”
Comments
Regulations
inspired by the global warming hoax drove the cost of coal-fired production of
electricity from 2 cents/kwh to 3 cents/kwh. More regulations caused the
production price of nuclear to rise as well.
Natural gas was the most favored replacement as its price went down to 3
cents/kwh. Other actions by government forced closure of hydro-electric plants
over the past decades.
The
repeal of Agenda 21 compliant regulations and Trump’s “buy America” policies
should produce a rise in coal use in the US, especially if gas goes up.
Overregulation of nuclear needs to be curtailed.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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