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Economically speaking its mostly opportunity for natural gas.
by mbell 7y ago
Economically speaking its mostly opportunity for natural gas.
- elgenie 7y agoThat reverses the causality. The opportunity existed 12-15 years ago; coal mining concerns going bankrupt is at the end of the process. Natural gas being able to beat the pants off coal on both price and pollution while also being generated in the US is the reason that natural gas plants opened and coal ones closed.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoPrice and pollution yes, but carbon no. Natural gas plants, while nominally 490 gCO2-eq/kW vs. coal's 800, are still very high carbon. Add in methane leaks from pipeline distribution and then LNG compression energy as the export market from the US rapidly increases in the gulf and it's parity. Fracked natural gas is a disaster from a climate change perspective. This is why we need to price in carbon externalities in energy markets.
- elgenie 7y agoAgreed that pricing in carbon externalities is a necessary step, but that will only make solar / wind / hydro more attractive with respect to natural gas. My point was more that the reasons that the coal industry is dead is that natural gas won exclusively on short-term economic thinking with zero contemplation of externalities.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoI'm more concerned about nuclear being more attractive wrt natural gas, since huge low-carbon nukes are getting shut down right after coal to be replaced with fracked natural gas. This is backwards from a climate change perspective. Damn fracking pulled the bottom out of electricity prices, screwing over nuclear plants whose O&M is pretty high. They were fine when electricity revenue was normal. But fracking dropped it off.
- elgenie 7y agoThere was pretty much nothing going on in terms of nuclear power development in the US between 1990 and 2008 or so, and Watts' Bar is the only reactor to come online in the US in the last 25 years. Fracking wasn't the cause of that lull.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoPeople stopped building new reactors in that time but they were also doing license extensions and operating and making good money. Today they are shutting down early in deregulated markets because natural gas brought electricity revenue below O&M costs.
- ioquatix 7y agoELI5. Can you retrofit coal generators with natural gas?
- Aloha 7y agoMy understanding is yes - but many coal plants are otherwise at the end of their natural lives.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoYour understanding is correct. “The most likely candidates for a coal-to-gas conversion are 50-plus year old units, less than 300 megawatts in capacity and generally early generation sub-critical utility boilers – the least efficient, most costly to operate and with the lowest overall capacity factor in the coal fleet,” he wrote. “Most plants west of the Mississippi River built in the 1960s or later aren’t as attractive as candidates for fuel switching since they are often larger, more efficient and tend to burn Powder River Basin coal, a cost effective fuel with a more favorable emission profile than the bituminous burned by many eastern plants.” Sidenote: Power River Basin coal is that which is mined by the company this article refers to as having entered bankruptcy. https://energynews.us/2017/02/24/midwest/conversion-to-natural-gas-brings-new-life-to-aging-coal-plants/ https://energynews.us/2017/02/24/midwest/conversion-to-natur...