4 ms·

“Carbon capture and sequestration does not work. It’s a pseudonym for ‘no coal,’” the CEO of Murray Energy, the country’s largest privately held coal-mining com

“Carbon capture and sequestration does not work. It’s a pseudonym for ‘no coal,’” the CEO of Murray Energy, the country’s largest privately held coal-mining company, told E&E News. ... “It is neither practical nor economic, carbon capture and sequestration,” he said last week. “It is just cover for the politicians, both Republicans and Democrats that say, ‘Look what I did for coal,’ knowing all the time that it doesn’t help coal at all.” People saying "you can make clean coal power, it's just really expensive," are saying essentially the same thing as this article. Over 90% of American coal is burned in power plants. Coal's big selling point is (was) producing cheap electricity. Once you make it clean, it's no longer cheap; see last week's declaration of surrender for the Kemper clean coal plant. It was 3 years behind schedule, $5 billion over budget, and still unfinished: https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/06/7-5-billion-kemper-power-plant-suspends-coal-gasification/ https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/06/7-5-billion-kemper-... It's just going to burn natural gas now. If you can't build new dirty coal plants in the US, and new clean coal plants cost significantly more than other clean electricity sources, then coal output will slowly decline another ~90% from last year's lows. Metallurgical coal is still going to be used for a long time but companies like Murray Energy would be doomed.

xoa 9y ago
Exactly. One of the entire core values of having electrical infrastructure and equipment is to make energy sources perfectly fungible, abstracting generation details from usage. That in turn means that energy generation is always about economics and national strategy (which in turn often just boils back down to economics), the expense of any given method is the whole point. This often comes up with "peak resource" issues, which aren't generally about using up all of a given resource so much as using all that can be reached for a given price. What we're really seeing are fossil fuel industries finally starting to have to actually compete under a real Free Market as society becomes less tolerant of letting them ignore their massive externalities. If coal is more expensive taking into account not being able to dump expensive pollution into the wider world, then it can and should go away. In fact that cost should have always been taken into account.

xoa 9y ago

Exactly. One of the entire core values of having electrical infrastructure and equipment is to make energy sources perfectly fungible, abstracting generation details from usage. That in turn means that energy generation is always about economics and national strategy (which in turn often just boils back down to economics), the expense of any given method is the whole point. This often comes up with "peak resource" issues, which aren't generally about using up all of a given resource so much as using all that can be reached for a given price. What we're really seeing are fossil fuel industries finally starting to have to actually compete under a real Free Market as society becomes less tolerant of letting them ignore their massive externalities. If coal is more expensive taking into account not being able to dump expensive pollution into the wider world, then it can and should go away. In fact that cost should have always been taken into account.