Posted on 11/06/2007 10:29:51 AM PST by Abathar
Now that the price of coal is at a historic low relative to oil, there's no stopping consumers and producers alike from embracing Al Gore's nightmare.
A ton of U.S. coal is so cheap at about $47 (U.S.) that European utilities will pay $50 to ship it across the Atlantic, according to Galbraith's Ltd., a 263-year-old London shipbroker. While oil and coal cost the same as recently as 1998, West Texas Intermediate crude is now five times more expensive after climbing to more than $90 a barrel.
Peabody Energy Corp., Consol Energy Inc. and Arch Coal Inc., the three biggest U.S. coal companies, forecast the largest increase in exports in 20 years, degrading the call for a moratorium on coal plants by former U.S. vice-president and this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore. Coal use worldwide has grown 27 per cent since 2002, three times faster than crude, said BP PLC. U.S. East Coast coal has risen 71 per cent, while oil tripled on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
"Coal is by far the cheapest fuel because there's no price on how much damage it causes," said John Holdren, a Harvard University professor of environmental science and director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Mass. "Unless you get policies to put a price on carbon dioxide and other emissions, no other plants can compete."
U.S. coal prices are equal to $1.98 for each million British thermal units of energy, compared with $12.51 for fuel oil and $6.91 for natural gas, data compiled by Bloomberg show. A million British thermal units is the equivalent of eight U.S. gallons (30.3 litres) of gasoline.
"There is a huge advantage with coal, and this will continue indefinitely," said Gianfilippo Mancini, the head of fuel purchasing for Enel SpA, Italy's largest power company, which is spending €4-billion ($5.8-billion U.S.) to convert oil-fed plants to run on coal.
Mr. Gore, 59, said five months ago the U.S. should adopt a "complete moratorium" on new coal-fed power plants unless all of the carbon dioxide from them can be buried underground. Government efforts to subsidize coal as an alternative to oil would be a "serious mistake," he said in a June 1 interview on Conversations with Judy Woodruff on Bloomberg Television.
U.S. coal exports to Europe for the first nine months of this year were 11.4 million tons, up 15 per cent from the same period in 2006, according to the U.S. Energy Department. Coal generates 41 per cent of the world's man-made carbon dioxide emissions, blamed for the warming of the Earth's climate, Gulf of Mexico hurricanes and rising sea levels.
The increased demand for coal boosted Peabody, Arch and Consol 36 per cent from Aug. 3 to Nov. 2 in New York trading, according to Bloomberg's U.S. coal index. Among Wall Street analysts, 76 per cent recommend buying shares of Peabody and 62 per cent recommend Consol, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
More than 1,000 coal-fed power plants will be built in the next five years, mostly in China and India, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. China, the world's biggest coal producer, became a net importer for the first time this year, taking supplies from Indonesia, Australia and South Africa and reducing the amount available for Europe.
"If those 1,000 plants get built without any controls on carbon emissions, we will careen into unmanageable changes in our climate," the 63-year-old Prof. Holdren said in an interview. "We need to motivate carbon capture and storage through policy. We will still be using coal, but in much smarter ways. It doesn't have to be an economy buster."
“Whole towns have been relocated to allow for mining.”
See these two recent threads:
Medieval Church Moves to New Home
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1916406/posts
700-year-old church in Germany moves
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1918968/posts
400 years supply is the estimate. About 100 years for the oil shale at current US use rates — More oil in the shale than most of the world’s reserves combined.
Maybe we will switch to nuclear power by then, the current liberals will be dead, so those obstacles to modern society won’t exist.
When you come to grips with the fact that man-made, carbon-induced global warming is total fiction, coal makes more sense than anything else. And the U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal.
Doesn't anyone remember that B Klintoon made the only area for low sulfer coal off limits & we then had to get it abroad from the only source available. That source, The Liggett Group, were HUGE donors to the Klintoon machine.
See post 45
The answer is a big ol “Hell Yeah” on that one...
If we built combined cycle Nuclear power/Coal to Liquids power plants, we could run our electrical devices and fuel our vehicles with resources that are already here in North America.
Absolutely. That’s all we need is leadership with the courage to tell GW shysters to take a hike. I think Kentucky and maybe West Virginia alone, are the Saudi Arabia of coal. That really shines a light on what a tremendous resource we have and are not utilizing as readily as we should.
Want.
Here in San Francisco CCTV (Central Chinese Television out of Bejing) is available. (Any country that wants to market in the US should study it.)
Whenever they place a camera outdoors in a large city, the air pollution almost always prevents seeing blue sky. It is perpetually gray there. I’ve been told by visitors that it is a rare day that you can see across town in Beijing.
They have 600,000,000 peasants who all want washing machines, heat in the winter, cars, hair dryers, et cetera. If the Chinese government wants to exist, it has no choice but to build coal power plants as quickly as it can. Their goal is one new one a week (possibly achieving only one a month).
They don’t have the luxury of caring what Al Gore wants us to believe about greenhouse gases and global warming.
United States is like the Saudi Arabia of coal - ten times over!
Theres a place about 15 miles from me where the stuff is just literally coming out of the ground.
$100 million + taxes, S & H and it’s yours!
Won’t fit in the driveway, sadly.
Didn’t Clinton manage to tie up a bunch of the coal in Utah - I think the stuff there is the lowest sulfur content coal in the entire world.
However, if you look at it, the start-up money could easily be recovered in a short time. If the plant produces 80,000 barrels a day, which should be around average, and you make $25 per barrel, that is $2,000,000 profit each day. Let's say it cost $100,000,000 to build the plant. In fifty days, you could have paid it off and everything else would be money in the bank.
Thank you for your post!
A buddy of mine a few years back frequently traveled to southeast Asia somewhere.
Hot - humid - miserably sticky. And the sweat drips off you kinda grayish and discolored.
He says everything there is gray - EVERYTHING! The pollution there is without doubt the worst in the world, hundreds, if not thousands of people die every year from it.
America is a paradise compared to that. Hell, LA is a paradise compared to that. No matter what the whackos say, we’ve done a pretty dam good job of it.
Yep, he sure did. See my original post at #13
The responses who remembered more details than me were:
#20, #22 and #45.
A great deal of our domestic low-sulfur coal was put off-limits when clinton established a huge area that prohibited mining it. (Coincidentally, his Indonesian buddies/contributors happened to have low-sulfur coal under their control.) The name "Escalante" comes to mind but I'm not sure that's it. I'll try to find a link for that.
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