Coal as energy source will grow, Arch exec testifies

(Photo of Arch Coal mine in West Virginia from Flickr and
Photograper Doc Searls )

Coal is the fuel of the future, three industry executives told a House committee this week, and the government needs to help clean it up.

“The world will continue to use coal, period,” Arch Coal CEO Steven Leer, told the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Coal, which is cheap and plentiful, will grow rapidly as an energy source and the question is whether CO2 emissions will grow with it, Leer said.

Coal is irreplaceable both here and abroad, said execs from Arch, Peabody Energy and Rio Tinto, and they need federal support for carbon capture and sequestration.

Leer said CCS is needed “to stabilize CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere within the next 40 years.”

Because CCS will not be available for use on a commercial scale until the 2020s, Peabody CEO Greg Bryce said, government should wait until then to regulate carbon. The feds also have a responsibility to fund CCS and research, he said.

Bryce criticized the Waxman-Markey bill passed by the House last summer, because it put a price on carbon. Rio Tinto exec Preston Chiara took a softer stance. He’s a founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), which supported the House bill.

The coal execs warned against a “rush to gas” as an alternative energy, questioning estimates about its availability and noting price volatility in the past. And they warned that tens of thousands of jobs could be lost if coal emissions are overly regulated or utilities switch to gas.

Meanwhile oil and gas exec T. Boone Pickens, who sees natural gas as a bridge to renewable wind energy, was testifying on behalf of gas before the House Ways and Means Committee. He said growth of cleaner technologies (gas has fewer emissions than coal) are needed to “protect American jobs” in the global competition to lead in the energies of the future. He apparently doesn’t agree with the three coal execs that coal is the fuel of the future.

See Grist blog's take on the Select Committee hearing.

(Sources: Greenwire story picked up by NYT , E&E Daily)