Humans first started burning coal 30,000 years ago.
While excavating a Paleolithic encampment near present-day Ostrava-Petřkovice in Czechoslovakia, archeologists found fragments of coal mixed up with incinerated mammoth bones and mammoth ivory. These were in black ground smudges that were clearly fire-pits or hearths.
The advantage of slow-roasting their mammoth over a coal fire was probably a no-brainer for our ancestors.
Provided they could find some coal.
Fortunately for them, coal seams appear in surface outcrops in some places. Chunks of coal fall on the ground: it’s there for the picking up. More is there for the prying loose.
Coal from this outcrop in Jirentaigoukou, China was used to smelt copper 3,800 years ago. Notice the chunk pile at the bottom:
So it would seem coal is not exactly newsworthy.
Indeed — until a few months ago — all the news about coal in the U.S. apparently belonged on the obituary pages.
It consisted of one grim announcement after another: some coal-fired power plant was scheduled to be shut down entirely, another was being switched over to use natural gas.
These were causality reports.
There really was a War on Coal.
It started in 2007, when the Sierra Club launched its ‘Beyond Coal’ campaign.
After Obama was elected in 2008, the Sierra Club gained a powerful ally in its war: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA.
The War on Coal reached an apotheosis of sorts in the final year of the Biden administration.
On April 25, 2024, the EPA issued, or updated, no fewer than four major rules effectively designed to end — basically for all time — the use of coal for electricity generation in the U.S.
In particular, the EPA’s “Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants” put a gun to the head of owners of coal-fired power plants.
Those owners had a ‘choice’ of either: (a) committing to retiring their coal plant by 2032, thereby escaping the new emissions requirements; (b) vowing to reduce the plant’s CO₂ emissions by 16% by 2023, thereby putting off the year of the plant’s retirement to 2039; or ( c ) implementing carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology by 2032.
That last was not much of an option. Only one coal-fired generating unit has ever captured CO₂ at any scale: the Petra Nova project at the W.A. Parish Generating Station outside Houston, Texas.
Petra Nova’s CCS gear has only worked on and off. In 2020, it was shut down. Last I checked, carbon capture was not expected to resume there until June 2025.
The EIA — the U.S. Energy Information Agency — says that during calendar year 2023 there were 225 coal-fired power plants in operation in the U.S.
Those generated 675 terawatt-hours of electricity that year, about 16% of the U.S. total.
A power station may have more than one coal-fired units, and may well have natural gas units. So a better number, statistically speaking, may be the count of coal-fired boilers in operation. The EIA’s last spreadsheet had over 1,000 of those.
That ambiguity, along with recent retirements, makes keeping the causality list from the War on Coal difficult.
The edit history of Wikipedia’s list of 211 coal-fired power stations in the U.S. [link] demonstrates the problem. A log entry notes: “Indian River plant in Delaware officially closed on February 23rd, 2025”.
The Sierra Club has turned coal’s deathwatch into a game. This page on the Club’s website features slot-machine-like spinning wheels that stop at the current score:
Aside: We note that the Sierra Club’s headquarters are in the San Francisco area (Oakland). It has a Washington, D.C. office for its lobbying efforts. The jobs lost at each of those 389 plant closing were, of course, in ‘flyover country’.
The mainstream media has likewise cheered on coal’s demise.
In February, Austyn Gaffney of the New York Times flatly pronounced “coal is a terminal case”. 1
Los Angeles Times climate columnist Sammy Roth wrote last year:
Over the last two decades, 21 coal-fired power plants have shut down across the Western U.S.
Twenty-one down, 32 to go.2
As if in some movie plot, many coal-fired power plants knew the day of their death in advance:
Then Donald Trump won the 2024 election.
And the War on Coal was over. Or so it seemed.
In a Tweet — if that’s still the right word — made to his Truth Social account on March 19, 2025, Trump wrote:
I am authorizing my Administration to immediately begin producing Energy with BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL.
Trump’s appointees — Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, and Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum — have been a little more forthcoming with details.
Burgum’s March 10, 2025 interview with Bloomberg News is probably the most revealing of the Trump administration’s thinking about coal.
I’ve annotated and lightly edited what Burgum said in that interview to make the following point list. Note that I’m just trying to make a list that’s readable, not automatically agreeing with everything Burgum says:
Coal plant retirements are over: “We've got to keep every coal plant open.”
The classic — non-CO₂ — emission controls on the existing coal plants are good enough. “If there's a coal plant still running in the U.S. it's among the cleanest in the world.”
We need to look at ‘un-retiring’ some units at coal-fired plants that have been shut down in recent years. These should go back to normal ‘baseload’ use, and not just be on standby for extra capacity that may needed in bad weather: “If there have been units at a coal plant that have been shut down, we need to bring those back on, not just when it's 20 [degrees] below [zero].”
“We've got two sources of baseload that have been neglected and sometimes demonized, and that's coal and nuclear.”
Trying to win the economic competition with China without coal is the U.S. competing with one hand tied behind its back. “China last year opened up a hundred gigawatts of new coal.”
AI is a very big deal in that competition. “Manufacturing intelligence [AI] now becomes the highest value product we've ever created with electricity since electricity was invented.”
“China in particular understands they need baseload to be able to win the AI arms race. They've also got 30 nuclear plants under construction, and they're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on hydro.”
“We're not in a period of energy transition. One of the big lies of the climate extremists is [the] energy transition. We're in a period of energy addition. We need additions for AI. We need additions in supply to keep the prices down and bring manufacturing back to the United States and reindustrialize our nation and not make the mistakes that Germany and the U.K. are making right now of deindustrializing.”
“Now we've got real demand from people that are willing to pay for it, and that's and that's the hyperscalers -- the five big tech companies have a $300 billion capex budget. Their capex budget is bigger than oil and gas. Bigger than automotive. Bigger than steel. Bigger than any other industry, and what they want to spend it on is electricity to drive [their] AI data centers.”
On March 12, 2025, Trump’s ‘new’ EPA announced it was going to reconsider the 2024 Biden EPA rules, including the “Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants.”
Real wars are hard to end. It takes more than a Tweet.
The forces at work have momentum. They can’t be turned around on a whim.
Aside: Which brings to mind the Titanic. It burned 700 tons of coal on each of its ill-fated days.
There’s the damage has been already been done.
The coal plant retirements can no doubt be slowed. But bringing back any already decommissioned is problematic.
Unlike the vintage nuclear plants — which were cared for like your grandfather’s 1970 Camaro, the oil changed every six months or 3,000 miles, need it or not — those old coal plants had some hard miles on them.
The initial instinct after a war or a natural disaster is to rebuild what was there before.
Upon reflection, it may be wiser to move on.
But to what, exactly?
One perennially good idea — always receding into the future — is ‘C2N’, coal to nuclear. Put a 360 megawatt SMR where a shuttered coal plant once was. The transmission lines are already there.
But those hypothetical SMRs would face the same economic problems as the coal plants they would be replacing. State and regional power markets are ‘rigged’ to favor renewables.
In power markets as they are structured today, the true economic competition isn’t among specific technologies.
It’s about renewables driving out ‘baseload’, whether that baseload comes from coal, nuclear, or natural gas.
That trend will take a lot to slow down, let alone unwind.
Ending the investment- and production-tax credits (ITC and PTC) enjoyed by renewables might help. But that would require Congress to act on a contentious issue.
If the War On Coal is over, what will be the nature of the peace?
In that war — as in all wars — Truth was an early casualty.
Someone — presumably the ‘new’ EPA — will have to sort out the legitimate environmental concerns about coal from the wartime propaganda put out by the ‘old’ EPA.
For reference, here’s the list of the traditional concerns associated with coal.
In the airborne category:
SO₂, sulfur dioxide, the supposed cause of acid rain;
NOx, a shorthand term for the two nitrogen oxides NO and NO₂, a chemical precursor of photochemical smog;
Hg, mercury, which coal combustion can emit in trace amounts in aerosol form (and can also show up in coal ash);
PM10, large particulate matter, otherwise known as soot;
PM2.5, fine particulate matter. PM2.5 has been a catch-all bogeyman used by the ‘old’ EPA for ideological purposes. More about that in a minute.
Coal’s solid combustion products — fly ash, bottom ash, boiler slag and flue gas desulfurization sludge — are a waste management problem, and need to be handled correctly.
Those can potentially contain lead, arsenic, chromium, and mercury.
That’s not disputed. The legitimate issue is about amounts. The dose makes the poison.
A long digression: Grok 3
In the early draft of this post, I had a slightly cheeky suggestion about who should sort out the wartime propaganda about coal: Maybe it should be Grok 3.
Most AI research tools in ‘Search’ mode end up parroting the conventional ‘wisdom’ they find on the web.
But Grok 3 has a ‘Think’ mode — during which it spews out a detailed log of its ‘thinking’ — that is both fascinating and amazing.
Ask Grok 3 well-formed questions on complex issues, and its thinking will greatly sharpen that of us pathetic humans.
In March, climate scientists Jonathan Cohler and Willie Soon pointed Grok 3 at CO₂ — specifically at the orthodox climate belief that humans determine the level of CO₂ in atmosphere, as if humans had a ‘control knob’ to twist.
On its own — and in minutes — Grok 3 zeroed in an observation made after the Covid pandemic.
During the pandemic, anthropogenic CO₂ emissions from industry fell dramatically. Yet the Keeling curve of steadily increasing CO₂ displayed not a blip or a wiggle.
I won’t regurgitate the resulting paper here, other than to quote one line from the abstract, which Grok 3 — according to Soon and Cohler — wrote: “Our analysis reveals that human CO₂ emissions, constituting a mere 4% of the annual carbon cycle, are dwarfed by natural fluxes…”
In a bit of showmanship, Cohler and Soon — well-known and well-respected if ‘skeptical’ climate scientists — gave Grok 3 authorship credit on the resulting paper, and went to the trouble of getting it peer-reviewed. They discussed the process on one of Tom Nelson’s YouTube podcasts, #170, a link to which is here.
Here’s a link to the paper itself, “A Critical Reassessment of the Anthropogenic CO₂-Global Warming Hypothesis: Empirical Evidence Contradicts IPCC Models and Solar Forcing Assumptions.”
After watching the Tom Nelson podcast, I realized there was nothing stopping me from using Grok 3 to start in on the ‘new’ EPA’s job.
So I started using Grok 3 to sort the wheat from the chaff in the ‘old’ EPA’s claims about the environmental impacts of burning coal.
The good news is that it works, and it’s been fascinating.
The bad news is that the results, while well-structured, are very long.
So I think I’ll have to post them separately. Watch this space for ‘The Grok 3 papers’ or some such thing.
Back to the EPA
Notably, ‘Project 2025’ — widely regarded as the Trump administration’s blueprint — does not call for abolishing the EPA.
Rather, it wants the EPA to go ‘back to basics’.
Clearly, the ‘new’ EPA is going to stop worrying about CO₂ as a air pollutant.
That will come when it reconsiders and ultimately reverses the 2009 Endangerment Finding. I wrote about that last month here.
But a ‘back to basics’ EPA will presumably continue to regulate old-school, traditional pollution.
I think, it will be interesting to see if there is a sea change in that thinking not just at the EPA, but in the public discussion.
To date, that has been dominated by people who have a deep-seated aversion to anything that can be labeled ‘pollution’.
That has religious roots, even etymologically. The noun comes from the Latin pollutio, which was a defilement or desecration, especially of a sacred place.
For decades, if there was an identifiable source of some emission, there was a Puritanical reflex to get rid of it.
Without bothering to ask if that particular emissions reduction would make much of a difference, or how much it would cost.
There was no level — except zero — that was ‘clean enough’.
So by that logic, every little bit helped.
The alternative view — that there is a level of ‘clean’ that is ‘clean enough’, and there are other things more important than virtue hygiene— is not as psychologically satisfying as feeling pure.
And compromise and nuance don’t play well on social media, which pushes everything towards extremes.
I like looking at a conundrum that exists in the very name ‘Environmental Protection Agency’.
Is the job of that agency to protect the environment from humans?
Or is it to attempt to protect humans from the natural environment?
The natural environment contains, of course, things like mercury, arsenic, lead, fine particulates, and CO₂.
The alternative view says: Live with it.
The Puritans are convinced they are going to die from it.
I hate it when I sound like Doomberg.
But let’s dig in.
First, to clear my head, I listen to the Firesign Theatre’s “Everything You Know Is Wrong”.
Because on coal, it certainly feels like it.
The discussion of coal’s impact on the environment needs a complete reset if CO₂ is taken out of the picture.
On CO₂ emissions, coal was hopeless.
So it could be written off. No need to waste time talking about the state of the art in emissions control for ‘all that other stuff’.
In my opinion, the obsession with CO₂ worked as a disservice to whose who care about the environment.
An enormous amount of ink was wasted debating the pros and cons of carbon capture, or CCS.
That took attention off the ball, as a magician does with misdirection.
Rhetorically, the key word was ‘unabated’.
‘Unabated’ was code for a plant without CO₂ capture.
For example, former U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, at COP28 in Dubai in December 2023, pledged that the U.S. would shut down all its ‘unabated’ coal plants. And he recommended the rest of the world do likewise.
An ‘unabated’ coal-fired power plant sounds like one that has no pollution controls at all.
In the U.S., there are none of those.
It’s true that the owner, NorthWestern Energy Group, of the ‘dirtiest’ coal plant in the U.S. is fighting the 2024 Biden EPA regulation that would require it to upgrade its existing gear to better capture fine particulates, PM2.5.
NorthWestern estimates those upgrades would cost between $350 million and $665 million.
The plant is in Colstrip, Montana, which — no offense to the town’s 2,096 residents — is in the middle of nowhere.
NorthWestern recently took an unusual email offer from the Trump EPA.
The March 24, 2025 offer was: send us an email explaining your circumstances, and we’ll consider granting you a two-year presidential exemption from the 2024 EPA rules. Those rules are currently under review and will most likely be rescinded.
The EPA even provided a helpful template with what should be in the email subject line.
While everyone was panicked about carbon dioxide, SO₂ emissions from the U.S. electric power sector decreased 93.4% between 1990 and 2020. NOx emissions fell 84.8%.
Coal-fired power plants using modern pollution control technology are now in the same ballpark on SO₂ and NOx emissions as natural gas plants.
Electrostatic precipitators and fabric filters can remove 99% of the fly ash from flue gases.
And the largest source of NOx in the atmosphere today has nothing to do with electricity generation — it’s cars.
ASCENT, a high tech air-quality monitoring network created by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2024, is able to figure out by chemical analysis where atmospheric aerosols are coming from.
ASCENT’s sensors found that if there is haze in New York City on a summer day, it’s primarily coming from growing vegetation.
The most dramatic incidents in poor air quality in recent years have come from the fires.
But those are one-off events, unrelated to anything.
Except perhaps to the devout, who believe that climate change, like the hand of God, is actually behind everything.
Air quality in a city is largely the product of its topology and meteorology.
And thus, in my opinion, best dealt with at a local or regional level.
So nation-wide numbers for air quality are not terribly meaningful.
But for what they are worth, the U.S. national numbers for the air pollutants targeted by the 1970 Clean Air Act demonstrate — to use a phrase I’ve used before — Mission Accomplished.
It’s important to look at actual concentrations in the atmosphere, in parts per billion (ppb), not emissions. Focusing on emissions, rather than on what’s actually in the air, can be misleading.
Here’s the EPA’s own chart for SO₂
And NO₂:
Keep in mind that those National Standard levels are, intentionally, very low.
I find one emissions chart for the U.S. power sector interesting because it shows a convergence of coal and natural gas on NOx around 2020:
Even if SO₂ and NOx are a Mission Accomplished, the ‘new’ EPA still has lots of work to do.
One coal-related obsession of the ‘old’ EPA — PM2.5, fine particulate matter — should, in my opinion, be swept into to the dustbin of history.
When SO₂ and NOx were improving, the old EPA needed a new weapon in the war on coal.
It decided to weaponize PM2.5.
Now, it was legitimate — back in the 1990s — for the EPA to wonder if near-microscopic particulates had a health impact on humans.
Air quality monitors sensitive enough to count particles that small only became available in the late 1980s.
And they are very small. A 2.5 micron–diameter particle will pass through an N95 mask. Those are designed to filter out 95% of airborne particles of a size of 0.3 microns or larger.
The EPA spent over $210 million on studies of PM2.5.
Had it been honest about its science, the EPA should have been open to those studies showing no result.
The toxicological studies certainly showed no result.
No laboratory animal died from exposure to PM2.5, even at levels 100 times that in bad outside air.
In another — and ethically dubious — set of experiments, the EPA tested a variety of air pollutants, including very high levels of PM2.5, on over 6,000 human volunteers, mostly young men.
There were no deaths or serious adverse events caused by PM2.5.
Giving the ‘disappointing’ results of the toxicological studies, the EPA fell back on ‘ecological’ or observational studies.
Exposure to PM2.5 was guesstimated from the subject’s zip code. Causes of death were taken off death certificates. Those were assumed to be meaningful and accurate.
Which is not entirely true. Everybody, in the official records, gets written down as dying from something. Old age, for example, is not an official cause of death.
There were a profusion of confounding factors that had to be statistically ‘controlled’ in the computer models.
But the academic researchers who took the EPA’s money knew what the Agency was looking for.
They sliced and diced the data until they found something.
People living in neighborhoods with bad outdoor air quality were slightly more likely to die sooner from things like cardiovascular disease or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Which is no doubt true.
The problem was that people living in those neighborhoods are statistically more likely to die sooner, period.
And their earlier mortality had numerous other, far stronger, explanations, most obviously socio-economic ones.
And there were counter-examples. Certain urban neighborhoods have lots of bad outdoor air, but are full of healthy — because wealthy — people.
No study actually proved that breathing PM2.5 caused cardiovascular disease or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
It was a just a correlation, and not a strong one at that..
If A is correlated with B, it does not follow that A is the cause of B.
It’s quite possible both A and B are influenced by something else, C.
Let’s use ‘being poor’ as C. Then the syllogism is:
A: poor people are more likely to live in neighborhoods with poor outdoor air quality;
B: poor people are more likely to die of cardiovascular disease or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
After 30-odd years of research, it remains etiologically (‘causing or contributing to the development of a disease or condition’) unclear how fine particle pollution could cause respiratory or cardiovascular diseases.
The media repeats an ‘explanation’ that is largely hand-waving: the particles are so small they somehow work their way from the lungs to the heart.
But they’re not found in the lungs or heart on autopsy.
At autopsy, the total content of mineral particulate matter in the human lung is about 0.1 grams.
None of that mattered. For the EPA’s purposes, PM2.5 was guilty by statistical association.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S., ahead of even cancer.
According to the CDC, is was responsible for over 695,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2021.
Multiply a large number like that by the (spurious) small statistical association, and you get a number that’s still pretty large.
That is the source of the shibboleth, blithely repeated in the media, that air pollution kills tens of thousands of people annually in the U.S.
On that claim, Steve Milloy summed it up best in a 2014 post with a great title: “Show Us the Bodies, EPA”:
This is on a par with traffic accident fatalities. While we can identify traffic accident victims, air pollution victims are unknown, unidentified and as far as anyone can tell, figments of the EPA’s statistical imagination.
But PM2.5 is eminently useful as a weapon, which we might expect from history.
PM2.5 is a contemporary recreation of the old miasma theory, which was received wisdom until the 1880s.
Soot, at least, you can see. PM2.5 is all the more scary of because it’s invisible.
Checking in with reality helps get out of the rabbit hole.
Here is the usual list of risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD):
Smoking
High blood pressure (hypertension)
High cholesterol
Obesity
Physical inactivity
Unhealthy diet
Excessive alcohol consumption
No mention of ‘air pollution’.
Indeed, only the World Health Organization (WHO) — among numerous sources such as the Mayo Clinic — even mentions ‘air pollution’ in relation to cardiovascular disease.
And that’s when it’s talking about indoor air pollution afflicting women in the Third World who must cook with wood or dung.
Aside: Who need inexpensive propane or butane burners to cook on, not lectures from the West about how their countries shouldn’t build coal plants.
So the ‘new’ EPA has plenty of sorting-out to do.
And, to be sure, even if the ‘old’ EPA’s public health claims were wildly exaggerated, you don’t want the ‘new’ EPS throwing out any babies with the bathwater.
The world owes most of its 1.1 trillion tons of coal to a relatively brief episode in the 4..5 billion year history of the earth.
‘Brief’ on the geological timescale: a mere 60 million years. Homo sapiens has been around 300,000 years.
19th century geologists — in large part because the high interest 19th industry had in finding coal — cataloged the strata of the earth’s topmost crust.
Coal was found in certain layers of sedimentary rock the geologists called ‘carboniferous’. As an adjective, that means ‘coal-bearing’.
‘Carboniferous’ also came to be used as the name of the geologic period during which those layers were laid down.
The Carboniferous started about 360 million years ago. So well before the dinosaurs.
Evolutionarily speaking, the Carboniferous was slightly freakish.
As usual, during the Carboniferous sea level rose and fell with glacial cycles.
When the poles locked up a lot of ice, exposed coastal areas were warm and swampy.
Odd species of trees, such as lepidodendron, grew in great profusion in those swamps:
As the lepidodendron trees died, the swampy forest floor became a massive mat of peat.
Here’s where the evolutionary quirk comes it: many of the critters and microorganisms that today eat on dead bark had yet to evolve.
Then — when the polar ice caps melted in the glacial cycle — seawater flooded back into the swamp and cut off oxygen.
So the normal process of organic decay was arrested in those peat bogs.
In the slow-moving taffy machine of geologic changes, the peat layer got buried, heated, and squeezed. The peat underwent a process called ‘coalification’.
Heated and squeezed a little bit, peat becomes the lowest grade of coal, lignite.
Aside: Traditionally, coal is ‘ranked’ by its ability to produce heat when burned, although since the 1970s coal’s sulfur content has become nearly as important.
Lignite looks a little like dark brown potting soil. It may even have woody bits and fragments of bark in it.
It’s no one’s first choice as a fuel, but lignite — like peat — can be burned. Lignite and the higher grades of bituminous of coal are often collectively referred to as 'steam coal'.
When lignite is cooked and pressurized a little longer, it turns into sub-bituminous coal. That has a higher percent of carbon (42% to 52%) than lignite.
In the U.S., sub-bituminous is found thick layers in Wyoming and Montana, in areas that were once along the coast of the ancient inland sea.
That Wyoming coal is comparatively easy to mine in huge open pits. 40% of U.S. coal comes from Wyoming.
Bituminous coal is the next step up, about 85% carbon. It has a hard, flinty black look.
The most prized coal is anthracite, which some find pretty: it’s glassy black in color and has an iridescent sheen.
Anthracite is between 86% and 97% carbon. It can be hard to ignite. When it does, it burns with a clean blue flame.
These days, anthracite tends to be reserved for industrial smelting, so it’s also called 'metallurgical coal'.
The anthracite deposits of the U.S. — most of them are in Pennsylvania — were a singular product of the tectonic folding that created the Appalachian Mountains. So extracting anthracite traditionally required underground mining.
For completeness’ sake, the ultimate end product of the coalification process is graphite, almost pure carbon.
As far as coal is concerned, the U.S. did very well in the geologic lottery,
The U.S. has 22.3% of the world’s reserves of coal, more than any other country. The U.S. is followed on the leaderboard by Russia (15.5%), Australia (14.0%) and China (13.1%).
Those ancient peat bogs could contain a variety of other stuff.
Sulfur is the fifth most common element in the earth’s crust. Coal’s sulfur content can vary widely.
In general, Wyoming coal is low in sulfur, Eastern coal high.
The mercury that can be found in today’s coal was put there by ancient volcanoes.
Mercury comes from rocks of high density, and needs some magma action to get forced upward through the Earth’s crust.
Likewise, the traces of lead found in coal were taken up from the soil by lepidodendron’s roots. Modern plants do the same thing.
There are a few technically true points about coal are worth giving a mention, if just for fun.
Coal is solar energy: it’s just energy that came from the sun 360 million years ago.
Second, it seems odd — to me anyway — that some people who have no problem burning living trees as ‘sustainable biomass’ — I’m thinking about Drax in the U.K. — have a problem burning ancient dead ones.
A thing to remember about coal is that burning it is a very inexpensive way to generate electricity.
Other things disregarded. I’ll get around to some of those other things.
Thus it should come as no surprise that coal generates most of the world’s power.
I started to write ‘still generates’, but caught myself.
There’s no reason to presume the inevitability of coal’s demise.
If anything, coal’s use globally is increasing:
Estimates of the size of the world’s reserves of coal are all over the place.
The World Coal Association, an industry group, says there’s enough to last 132 years at the current rate of consumption.
But that association did its credibility no favors when, in 2023, it rebranded itself “FutureCoal: The Global Alliance for Sustainable Coal”.
In 1865, economist William Stanley Jevons famously speculated that Britain might exhaust its coal supplies in The Coal Question3.
But ‘peak anything’ theories always run afoul of a complicating factor: there are reserves to be found, they just cost more to extract.
Should the world ever come to it, for example, there’s coal in Antarctica:
Electricity has been intimately intwined with coal since the 1880s.
Electricity was a laboratory curiosity — a shockingly entertaining one — before the advent of the telegraph.
The telegraph did get electricity out into the world, but used clunky batteries.
Coal got electricity into people’s homes.
Starting with that of J.P. Morgan at 36th and Madison, in New York City.
The electrification of Morgan’s house is a too good story not to tell.
The house is still there, by the way, and now the Morgan Library & Museum.
Morgan had been one of the first-round investors in the Edison Electric Light Company in 1878.
Aside: In 1892, Morgan would arranged the merger of Edison General Electric with Thomson-Houston Electric that formed General Electric.
In 1881, Morgan’s elegant Italianate brownstone was undergoing a top-to-bottom renovation.
Morgan volunteered his house to Edison as a test site.
It would be the the first private residence in New York illuminated solely by electric light. ‘Solely’ was an important aspect of the test.
In those days, if you wanted electricity, you had to generate it yourself.
Consolidated Edison — the utility you’d call today — was then the New York Gas Light Company.
In cities, gas companies would happily supply you with coal gas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Coal gas had been distributed by urban pipes as far back as the 1810s.
Coal gas was troublesome stuff. Edison called it a 'vile poison'. From time to time, a guest at some hotel would snuff the flame on the wall sconce, forget to turn the key to shut off the gas, and wake up dead.
Aside: Coal gas should not be confused with ‘natural’ gas, which is methane. Utilities now add mercaptan to natural gas as a safety feature, to give it that distinctive rotten egg smell.
The Edison Company put a coal-fired steam engine and electrical generator in a shed out back of the Morgan mansion. It had a full-time attendant.
For a time, Edison & Co. considered on-site generation a possible business model.
Edison’s DC current couldn’t travel very far.
And in cities like New York, the situation with overhead lines was entirely out of control:
Given the requisite bribes for Tammany Hall, it cost a lot of money — even then — to dig up New York City streets to bury lines underground.
So one idea was to sell building owners who wanted electricity small coal-fired generators to install in their basements.
There was some infrastructure already in place: coal was delivered regularly (down those those cute coal chutes) to be burned in steam boilers and fireplaces for heat, and in stoves for cooking and baking.
The first electricity test lit up Morgan’s house with 385 bulbs on June 8, 1882.
There were a few kinks that had to be worked out. The generator clanked and sparked like a daemon.
But no one had seen rooms with that quality of light before.
In an uncharacteristic bit of democracy, the bulbs were located not only where they would show off Morgan’s art collection and Romanesque dining room, but also in the servants’ halls and butler's pantry.
As the fall 1882 social season opened, a few fortunate Society scribblers got a peek inside Morgan’s renovated house.
One marveled: “In order to illuminate a room, you have simply to turn a knob as you enter.”
Aside: Gas lamps had to be lit one at a time. One of Edison’s favorite demos was flipping a master switch that would make 100+ lights come on at once in spectacular fashion.
Next door to the Morgan house, however, Mrs. Brown was not happy.
The steam engine — typically fired up at dusk — made a lot of noise. It set her whole house to vibrating. The acidic fumes from the burning coal permeated her pantry, tarnishing Mrs. Brown’s silver.
J.P. Morgan had a word with the Edison Company.
The vibrating steam engine was put on an India rubber pad. The shed was soundproofed with felt.
And, in an early triumph of air pollution remediation, a ditch for a square brick pipe was dug across Morgan’s backyard to funnel the smoke from the steam engine into the mansion's chimney.
Mrs. Brown was presumably placated.
But no good deed goes unpunished.
Morgan’s son-in-law later wrote: “In the winter when the snow melted above the brick conduit, all the stray cats in the neighborhood gathered on this warm strip in great numbers, and their yowling gave grounds for more complaints.”
By 1902, only 20 years after Edison’s Pearl Street power station was opened, there were 2,250 coal-fired power plants in the United States.
Hydropower could also generate electricity.
But transmission lines had to be built from relatively remote sites. Tesla’s and Westinghouse’s 1896 alternating current line ran 22 miles from Niagara Falls to Buffalo, New York.
AC would eventually win the ‘War of the Currents’ and become the standard for transmission in the U.S.
But in the meantime, coal plants could be built fast, and close to where the power was needed.
Nocturnal visitors to the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago were dazzled by the tens of thousands of clear lights illuminating the ‘White City’.
It all looked so clean and modern.
And was powered by a number of purpose-built, smoky coal plants, kept well out of sight beyond the borders of the Exposition.
Coal’s demise in the first decades of the 21st century has not only been precipitate, it’s fallen off a high perch.
This graphic gives a sense of the speed of the decline:
As for the high perch, throughout the entire 20th century coal produced roughly half the electricity generated in the United States. The balance came from hydropower and a changing mix of other sources:
Coal’s more recent peak shares — 52.8% of U.S. electricity generation in 1997 and 51% in 2001 — were in line with the average for the entire 20th century.
In 2024, coal’s share was 16%.
After the oil price shock in 1973, calls for U.S. energy independence led to a brief building boom of new coal-fired power plants.
Aside: Coal’s competition at the time was nuclear. The environmental groups of the 1970s hated a lot of things, including hydro, but they hated nuclear so much they gave coal a pass.
On this chart, we can see coal’s boom years at the bottom in dark brown. We can also see, circa 2010, what I call the ‘Dick Chaney boomlet’ in coal. I’ll get to that in a minute:
There’s no problem with this 2016 graphic being out of date: the last large coal-fired power plant to come online in the U.S. was the Sandy Creek Energy Station in Texas in 2013.
Coal’s problems in the New Millennium trace back to a different presidential transition, the election of George W. Bush in 2000.
Bush’s vice president was Dick Cheney, who had been a Congressman from Wyoming, the coal-mining state.
When Cheney — everyone’s favorite villain in those days — wasn’t busy starting wars in the Middle East, he took it upon himself to chair what he called the National Energy Policy Development Group.
In the early 2000s, age was already creeping up on those 1970s coal plants. Coal-fired power plants, unless put on life extension, are usually good for around 35 years.
By 2006, Cheney’s group was recommending that the U.S. build 150 new coal-fired plants to replace the old ones.
The opening salvo in the War on Coal were aimed squarely at Dick Cheney.
The story is told in a 2017 book Climate of Hope4 by Carl Pope, who was the executive director of the Sierra Club until 2010.
In this passage, note the term ‘climate pollution’. It’s CO₂ — not traditional air pollution — the Sierra Club was worried about:
the proposed new plants would emit so much climate pollution for the forty years of their expected lifetime that if they were built, it would become mathematically impossible to tame the global-warming monster. This next generation of coal plants, she [Verena Owens, a club volunteer] told us, would lock the United States into 750 million additional tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year, just when we needed to be cutting those emissions by that same amount by 2012.
Thus in February 2007, the Sierra Club’s leadership made the fateful decision to become an energy policy lobby at the national — i.e., Washington, D.C. — level.
Prior to that, most of the Club’s environmental fights had been local or regional.
“The ambition of the task left me uneasy,” Pope writes. “But the die was cast. The Sierra Club was now committed to transforming the entire energy sector of the United States, and to prevent it from locking itself into another generation of coal-fired power.” [My emphasis]
The Sierra Club was not alone in being obsessed with global warming and carbon dioxide during those years.
For a reference date, I like to use the opening (in New York and Los Angeles, naturally) of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” on May 24, 2006.
In 2007 — even then — Hillary Clinton was running for president. She announced her campaign on January 20 that year.
The top bullet point in a Clinton campaign document — “Powering America’s Future: Hillary Clinton’s Plan to Address the Energy and Climate Crisis” — was:
Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% from 1990 levels by 2050 – the level necessary to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.
Her second bullet point is also interesting, in hindsight:
Cut foreign oil imports by two-thirds from projected levels by 2030.
At the time, US oil imports had been increasing steadily every year since 1954. They had reached what turned out to be their peak in 2005.
The Clinton campaign argued the U.S. needed to “reduce electricity consumption 20% from projected levels by 2020.”
If we’re calling things by their right name, that’s a call for energy austerity.
But not to worry: energy efficiency would take the sting out of energy austerity.
The Clinton campaign document listed such measures as “enacting strict appliance efficiency standards, and phasing out incandescent light bulbs.”
Aside: That sound is Thomas Edison rolling in his grave.
Energy efficiency measures exist along a pain spectrum.
Changing a light bulb is on the mild end. ‘Demand response’ — conforming your electricity consumption to suit your utility’s production schedule — is somewhere in the middle. Energy rationing and rolling outages are at the extreme end.
However laudable energy efficiency may sound, it comes with a hidden kicker.
It’s hard to distinguish reduced electricity consumption that comes from efficiency from that which comes from ‘structural changes in the economy’.
Here’s a 2017 Department of Energy graphic:
‘Structural changes in the economy’ can be a polite way of talking about deindustrialization.
Such as exporting manufacturing — along with its attendant CO₂ emissions — to China.
Seven of the top 10 processors of the polysilicon used in solar panels, for example, were, in 2022, in China. Three of those had their own on-site coal-fired power plants.
Aside: The UK’s economic stagnation suspiciously dates from 2008, after the exhaustion of North Sea gas and the UK’s passage of its Climate Change Act, which made Net Zero a national goal. I wrote about that here.
Unbeknownst to Hillary Clinton, the Sierra Club and (probably) Dick Cheney, 2007 was a turning-point year in U.S. energy history.
Refreshingly, it had little to do with government policy.
The 1970s conviction that the U.S. was running out of oil and natural gas was still around.
For conventional oil and gas, that was largely true.
But the shale gas revolution had been building up steam quietly in the early 2000s.
By 2008, it was out in the open.
That year, shale gas production jumped 71% over the previous year. That dramatically reversed decades of declining U.S. natural gas output.
Now, 2008 was an odd year. That’s when the Great Recession kicked in.
But for whatever combination of reasons, in 2008 Henry Hub spot prices for natural gas dropped like a stone, from $13.31/MMBtu on July 3rd to $5.71 in December. That’s a 57% price cut.
With the usual wiggles up and down, the price of natural gas has stayed below early 2000s levels ever since:
Carl Pope acknowledges that, in 2007, the Sierra Club needed to make some changes if it wanted to stay relevant.
And solvent.
Individual club memberships had been drying up.
Fortunately for the Club, lobbying on energy policy proved to be a highly lucrative line of business.
“Later in the spring of 2007,” Pope writes, “I got a phone call. Aubrey McClendon, the head of a natural gas company called Chesapeake Energy, wanted to meet with us.”
Chesapeake Energy and its executives — primarily McClendon — ended up giving the Sierra Club’s ‘Beyond Coal’ campaign some $26 million, most of it anonymously.
As Pope writes, “[W]e became more reliant on money that came with strings.”
Those strings were at times embarrassing. In 2008 the Sierra Club received $1.3 million from Clorox to endorse that company’s ‘Green Works’ brand of environmentally-friendly cleaning products.
The secretive nature of McClendon’s donations, when revealed, prompted a mini-scandal within the Club and was a factor in Pope’s resignation as executive director.
But the ‘Beyond Coal’ campaign quickly found even better-heeled patrons.
In 2011, it got a $50 million pledge from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization set up by Michael R. Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City.
Bloomberg made that announcement standing on a boat with the GenOn coal-fired power plant in Alexandria, Virginia in the background:
That plant shut down the next year.
But money wasn’t the most important thing the Sierra Club got from Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Advisors from Bloomberg schooled the Club in modern management.
Say what you will about the Sierra Club’s war on coal: it was not incompetently waged.
In one of the chapters he wrote for that same 2017 book, Michael Bloomberg recounts approvingly that, after their tutelage by the Bloomberg pros:
The Sierra Club team did a plant-by-plant analysis, assigning metrics for environmental impact and political climate (that is, how much opposition we anticipated) to determine the expected value of targeting any given plant. They then organized plants into three categories: easy, moderate, and hard.
The Beyond Coal campaign eventually got over its flirtation with natural gas and moved on to renewables. Note what the children are holding:
Bloomberg Philanthropies would eventually give over $174 million to Beyond Coal.
David Gelbaum, who died in 2018, gave over $200 million.
Gelbaum was a Wall Street math whiz who made his fortune in the 1980s trading derivatives for Princeton Newport Partners.
Gelbaum was also CEO and chairman of the board of Entech Solar and an investor in a diverse portfolio of climate-tech companies, including those promoting electric cars and smart grids.
Behind the curtain — in the effort to transform ‘the entire energy sector of the United States’ — were a few billionaires.
For many, the flatline or outright decline in U.S. electricity production during the decade 2013–2023 was no cause for alarm.
Recall Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign pledge to reduce U.S. electricity consumption by 20% by 2020. The energy transition was the important thing.
The spin of the Sierra Club and other renewables advocates was that coal was being replaced by renewables in the 2010s.
That claim seems superficially plausible, since the percentage of U.S. electricity generated by coal has been falling, and the percentage generated by renewables has been rising.
But actual numbers in the EIA’s (Energy Information Agency) “Net Generation by Energy Source: Electric Utilities, 2013 - 2023” — a link is here — paint a more disturbing picture.
U.S. electricity production fell during those years. It produced 198 GWh less electricity in 2023 than it did in 2013.
The decline in electricity generated by coal was a whopping 670 GWh.
The majority of that shortfall was taken up by natural gas, which increasing by 394 GWh.
Next to those numbers, the increase in electricity generated by renewables pales by comparison: an increase of 53 GWh from wind and 21 GWh from solar.
Nuclear and hydro, by the way, were basically flat in that decade.
Conclusion: the U.S. replaced its lost coal-fired electricity with either (a) natural gas or (b) nothing at all.
It’s a rare thing when a consulting group report dramatically changes everyone’s thinking. Maybe even anyone’s thinking.
But that happened in December 2023 with a GridStrategies presentation called “The Era of Flat Power Demand is Over.”
The methodology of the GridStrategies authors — John D. Wilson and Zach Zimmerman — was simple.
They collected the filings that U.S. utilities are required to make with FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, in which the utilities estimate future demand in their areas.
It varied by region, but when Wilson and Zimmerman totaled everything up, electricity demand in the U.S. looked likely to grow 5% a year between 2024 and 2029.
That’s a growth rate last seen in the 1960s.
And it was, in the authors’ words, “likely an underestimate.”
There were two big reasons: (a) future data centers and AI demand and (b) an increase in U.S. manufacturing.
Ironically, some of that was the ‘green manufacturing’ spurred by the IRA.
Utility planners were suddenly looking at adding all kinds of new generation to meet demand growth through 2028.
And retiring the 80.6 GW U.S. coal-fired capacity by the end of 2030 didn’t seem like such a great idea. That’s 62 Vogtles in my favorite unit.5
Coal’s death during the 2010s is often attributed to natural causes.
Coal can’t compete in the market.
Yes and no. Markets are social constructs.
Let’s consider a hypothetical utility that has a portfolio of generation sources to meet demand.
The ‘demand curve’ for its electricity wiggles at the top, depending on the season and time of day.
The utility would traditionally put demand in three boxes: baseload, peak, and intermediate.
Baseload is the line you can safely draw underneath the wiggles:
Up to the baseload level, our hypothetical utility had a lot of options for how to generate that much electricity. It could use its best judgement.
It might well decide to run its nuclear or coal plants as close to capacity as they can get. That’s where they are the most economic.
Those old plants are likely to be fully amortized. Their ‘mortgages’ — capital costs — were paid off decades ago.
That alone typically makes them a low-cost source of electricity, unless something strange is going on with the price of fuel.
Working against that advantage, they have higher repair bills, as with an old car.
And if they are indeed close to end of life — a difficult call, as it is with humans and old autos — spending on major upgrades is problematic.
If our hypothetical utility was a regulated monopoly in a state with old-school PUC regulation, it would have one other slightly perverse incentive to shut down its old coal plant.
State PUCs approve rates that guarantee a utility a return on invested assets, often 9%.
So for them, building something —anything — is akin to buying a reasonably safe bond.
That fully-depreciated coal plant may be cheap to run, but it’s no longer earning ‘interest’.
So compared to other options for the hypothetical utility’s portfolio, it needs to be a little extra profitable.
Then there are factors outside control.
Low natural gas prices may make electricity cheap for some indefinite spell.
Coal plants often make the bulk of their profit during the winter months A warm winter can leave a coal plant idle and in the red.
Our hypothetical utility may be part of a larger entity that has a power market, such as a Regional Transmission Organization or RTO.
In the 2010s, power market rules — in various wonky ways — evolved to prioritize renewables.
Renewables ranked highest in the so-called ‘merit order’ of dispatch. For example, electricity from wind — if available — might always be purchased first.
And, of course, wind and solar could bid low, since they were the beneficiaries of a slew of ‘out of market’ subsidies.
As generation by renewables increased, they encroached into what was formerly baseline territory. The level at which it was ‘safe’ to generate with coal and nuclear got lower and lower.
I like real charts. Here’s ERCOT from March 21st [2025]. You can see nuclear and coal almost hiding from daytime solar down at the bottom:
Natural gas is flexible, which allows it to fill in gaps.
But the same anti-baseload phenomenon relegates natural gas to ‘peaker’ use, a cost factor under-appreciated and under-reported. Gas turbines are most economical if they run 24/7, no starts or stops.
So the real conflict of the 2010s wasn’t about coal versus natural gas, or coal versus renewables.
It was renewables versus baseload.
Baseload — whether coal, nuclear or natural gas — was not ‘economic’ under the rules of the game.
Aside: Our hypothetical utility might benefit from ‘capacity payments’ to keep its coal plant around for emergencies. Those have been criticized a corporate welfare, which in a sense they are. But maintaining a ‘shadow grid’ is a renewables cost. It’s form of insurance, since renewables will from time-to-time fall down on the job.
The 1970s coal plants suffered from a ‘generational’ problem, not unlike the effect retiring Baby Boomers are having on Medicare and Social Security.
Dick Cheney was right about one thing in 2005: those coal plants should have started thinking about retirement at age 35.
The Sierra Club’s true victory post–2007 was its legal actions that stopped many of the replacement coal plants Cheney wanted to build.
On the retiring the old plants, the Sierra Club was to some extent pushing on a closing door.
The role of its ally in the War on Coal, the EPA, was critical.
The four major EPA regulations affecting coal as of April 25, 2024 were:
Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants
Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) (first issued in 2012)
Effluent [Wastewater] Limitations Guidelines (ELG) for Steam Electric Power Plants
Coal Combustion Residuals (CCR) Rule (Issued 2015, Expanded 2024)
The EPA also tightened the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for particulate matter (PM) on January 15, 2013 and for ground-level ozone in October 2013.
And, while a not new regulation, the EPA has kept within its power approval over coal plant upgrades, should it decide those were ‘major’ enough to be subject to 1999 Clean Air Act New Source Review (NSR) enforcement.
Coal’s death was not entirely from natural — that is, market — causes.
It was an assisted euthanasia.
In 2021, David Drake and Jeffrey York, two professors of business at the University of Colorado Boulder, looked at 348 coal-fired units that had either retired or switched to natural gas between January 2008 and September 2016.
They found no evidence that natural gas prices were a significant factor.
What they did find was that any coal plant targeted by the Sierra Club had its life shortened, on average, by two years.
And, nationwide, they found that “federal regulation affected the greatest number of coal units, and thus had the greatest aggregate impact on coal retirements.”
A real-world case study puts some life in the statistics about coal plant mortality.
The Homer City Generating Station in western Pennsylvania once had 3 coal-fired units that could generate 1.9 GW of electricity.
That’s 1.5 Vogtles in my unit of generating capacity.
Homer City was built in the 1960s by Pennsylvania Electric Co. (PenElec). The nearby city it served (50 miles) was Pittsburgh.
Units 1 and 2 began operation in 1969. Unit 3 began operation in 1977. Presumably Unit 3 was one of those 1970s oil crisis babies.
Until 1999, all three coal units averaged 90% of capacity.
Aside: Capacity of any power plant rarely reaches 100% because they spend some time offline for maintenance.
An interesting thing about the Homer plant is that its various owners did everything the EPA wanted.
In 1998, they installed equipment to reduce mercury output.
In 2000 and 2001, the owner at the time, General Electric, installed Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) on all three coal boilers to reduce NOx emissions.
In 2001, under the George H.W. Bush–era SO₂ allowance trading program, GE installed flue gas desulfurization (FGD) equipment — a ‘scrubber’ — on Unit 3.
In 2014, in advance of the EPA mercury rule coming into effect, scrubbers were installed on Units 1 and 2, at a cost of $750 million.
Flue gas scrubbers capture most, if not absolutely all, of any mercury in the flue gas.
But given the electricity buying rules of the PJM market, Homer operated at progressively less capacity from 2005 to 2022. By 2020, it was running only 20% of the time:
The particular regulatory straw that broke Homer’s back in 2023 was an additional investment that would be needed to meet the EPA’s then-anticipated tightening of its 2006 nitrogen oxides (NOx) emission standards.
Nor did it seem very wise to make an additional investment in Homer when Pennsylvania was planning to join something called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a 12-state compact that would set a cap on greenhouse gases.
According to EPA figures, Homer City produced around 3.5 million of Pennsylvania’s 293 million tons of CO₂ per year. That’s 1% of the state total.
Aside: Given the size of the plant, that doesn’t sound like a lot to me.
In any event, the owner, Homer City Generation, L.P. decided to pull the plug. Homer went offline on July 1, 2023.
On Saturday, March 22, 2025, Homer’s smokestacks can down.
I confess I copped this video from the Wall Street Journal. If it doesn’t play, you can watch a different video of the stacks coming down on this page.
Coal was iconic in Pennsylvania’s history. All five of the state’s remaining coal plants are scheduled to be shut down or converted to natural gas by 2028.
But the story of Homer continues. Think of it as a parable for our times.
Homer — the site, anyway — may undergo a resurrection.
We pick up Homer’s saga in mid-2024.
That’s one year after it was shut down, and six months after the GridStrategies report.
PMJ planners were then freaking out about the RTO’s ability to met demand in the near future: “PJM projects a shortfall in supply by the end of this decade —or sooner.”
That’s because 21% of its generating capacity, mostly coal, was scheduled for retirement, and not being replaced by anything very fast.
On this chart, the color choice is a bit confusing.
The left-hand horizontal bars break down the reason for the retirements. The long blue bar shows ‘retirements taking place due to state or federal environmental policies’, contrasted to ‘economic’ ones in gold.
The right-side pie circle shows in purple that 60% of the retirements are of coal:
Not only is 40 GW retiring, the PJM planners estimate the RTO will need an additional 40 GW “over the next 15 years due to electrification and large new loads, such as data centers.”
The planners go on to bemoan that “new generation projects face delays from supply chain, financing, and siting issues.”
Among those supply chain issues is an open secret: orders placed now for utility-scale gas turbines are unlikely to be delivered until 2028 or 2029.
Undaunted, Knighthead Capital Management, a New York–based hedge fund, announced big plans for the Homer site.
Knighthead is the majority owner of an entity called Homer City Redevelopment. It wants to build a gigantic AI data-center campus on the site, to be powered by natural gas.
The Wall Street Journal likes my favorite power unit, the Vogtle, so I’ll quote it:
At up to 4.5 gigawatts, the plant could nearly power Manhattan. Its output would more than double that of the original coal facility and be roughly equivalent to Georgia’s Vogtle plant, the country’s largest nuclear power site.6
We can only wish Homer well.
Just don’t expect to see him back from the grave soon.
It’s the convention in a post like this to conclude with a section of pontification.
After the title of the book by Vladimir Lenin, I call those sections the “What Is To Be Done?”
The road to energy abundance may not be paved with yellow bricks.
Consider the source of the U.S.’s current good luck: natural gas.
I don’t take back what I said about ‘peak x’ theories usually being wrong.
But several writers, such as Adam Rozencwajg of G&R, make a pretty good case that “the shale gas basins are simply running out of high-quality drilling inventory.”
There’s been a slowdown in U.S. natural gas production, often blamed on low prices.
Rozencwajg questions whether higher prices will be enough to spur an increase in production. The culprit may be geology.
So there’s that potential problem. Then there’s LNG.
I’m in all favor of the U.S. exporting as much LNG as it can. The balance of trade needs all the help it can get.
But increased LNG exports will tend to bring U.S. natural gas prices up toward the world price.
So it would be a big mistake to just airily say the U.S. should leave its coal in the ground because it’s ‘dirty’ and ‘we don’t like it’.
It’s too important a resource.
I think Chris Wright’s DOE, perhaps through ARPAE, should spend some money building a start-of-the-art coal-fired power plant as a reference model.
Forgetting about carbon capture.
And measuring the heck out of any traditional pollutants that happen to escape the plant.
Consider that a re-do of the DOE’s old Clean Coal Demonstration Project, which ended in 2013.
Actually, one state-of-the-art coal plant has been built in the U.S. in recent years.
It’s small (17 MW) and in Fairbanks, Alaska — 155 miles south of the Arctic Circle — so it didn’t get much attention when started operation in 2019.
Coal was an obvious — indeed almost only — choice for electricity and steam heat at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks campus (UAF).
Fairbanks, the town, does not have a piped natural gas supply from a gas field.
Its electricity comes from coal anyway, from a generating plant located at the state’s only coal mine, 100 miles away near Healy.
For the campus, where temperatures in the winter that can stay below -20° F. for week, the reliability that comes from having a supply of coal on site was crucial in the fuel decision.
In 2018, the campus plant was kitted out with everything state-of the-art in coal technology: a Babcox and Wilcox circulating fluidized bed combustor (CFB) with lower combustion temperatures that reduce NOx emissions; limestone injection for in-situ sulfur oxides absorption; and with multi-clone and baghouse scrubbing to reduce particulate emissions, both PM10 and PM2.5.
The UAF plant has the lowest PM 2.5 particulate emissions of any coal-fired boiler.
Fairbanks, ironically, is an EPA ‘non-attainment’ air quality area — because so many of its residents burn wood.
The U.S. has waged many wars that arguably weren’t worth the fighting.
We could start with Vietnam and move on to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The War on Coal seems likely to join that list.
But we may not know the true cost of the War on Coal until later, perhaps until the 2030s.
Deindustrialization by energy austerity, as we see it play out in Germany and the UK, is a wasting disease. It manifests slowly, over decades.
My hope is that we ended the War on Coal in time.
Austyn Gaffney, “Why Coal Has Been So Hard to Quit in the U.S.”, New York Times, February 6, 2025. Link.
Sammy Roth, “Here are the 32 coal plants still powering the American West”. L.A. Times, April 24, 2024. Link.
The Wikipedia entry on Jevon’s The Coal Question is passable. In that same book, Jevons put forward the famous and troubling ‘Jevons paradox’, which holds that increased efficiency in using a energy resource such as coal leads to more consumption, not less.
Michael Bloomberg and Carl Pope, Climate of Hope: How Cities, Businesses, and Citizens Can Save the Planet. 2017, St. Martin’s Press.
I like to call 1.3 gigawatts a ‘Vogtle’ — a figure for the output of one of that Georgia plant’s AP1000s — because it gives a sense of how much effort is required to replace that much capacity.
Jennifer Hiller, “A Big Coal Plant Was Just Imploded to Make Way for an AI Data Center”, The Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2025. An outfit called “Thumb Coast Aerial” apparently took the drone video.