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)

Guess who will be selling natural gas to the U.S.?

(Photo of Gazprom sign in Moscow from Flickr and photographer Martin Griffiths)

News Update: When T. Boone Pickens came up with his plan for natural gas to fuel U.S. cars, the idea was that gas would be local. Now, look who’s getting into the act – Russia. Gazprom, the Russian company that supplies 85% of Russia’s natural gas and 25% of Europe’s, is eyeing the North American market as a customer for its offshore gas fields. The company plans to buy a small, unidentified, natural gas marketing and trading company in the U.S., Jack Hattenberger, Gazprom president for U.S. marketing and trading told a U.S.-Russian business group last week. “Long-term our goal is to develop a leading marketing and trading organization in North America, using LNG [liquid natural gas] as our foundation supply." The company plans to ship 500 million to a billion cubic feet a day here starting in 2014 and ramp up to 4-10 billion cubic feet. (The U.S. Department of Energy expects our consumption of natural gas to be about 24 trillion cubic feet by 2016.) Gazprom execs, including 2 who are close to Putin, also visited Alaska last week to pitch help in extracting its gas. They have experience in the far north, they said. I don’t mean to sound protectionist here, but what happened to independence from foreign oil. Doesn’t that apply to gas too? And didn’t Russia turn off the pipeline to Eastern Europe to put political pressure on them. T. Boone, I don’t think this is what you had in mind. (Source: E&E News PM)

… as oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens plans largest wind farm ever

(Photo of Texas wind farm from Flickr and and photographer fieldsbh)

News Update 4: Texas mogul T. Boone Pickens is expecting a windfall. As you no doubt have seen, he plans to construct the world’s largest wind farm, in the Texas Panhandle, and make a(nother) fortune while cutting U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Pickens’ much publicized Pickens Plan is to put up 2,700 wind turbines over the next 4 years and generate enough electricity to power more than 1 million homes. The 80-year-old Pickens has convinced neighboring ranchers to put the turbines on their land for $10,000-$20,000 each. He, himself, isn’t going to have any – saying they’re ugly – but he’s worth $3 billion and doesn’t need the money. The Texas conservative hopes to pressure Congress to do more about clean energy. Oil peaked in Texas in 1973, so now he’s on to something new. He says it’s ridiculous for the U.S. to import 70% of its oil at a cost of $700 billion a year. His plan is to use wind and solar for power, and then shift natural gas to replace gasoline for fuel. No doubt he’ll make some money at that end too. While environmentalists love his big push for wind, most don’t like the natural gas bit, since it’s only about 30% lower in carbon than gasoline. (Sources: The Guardian, Huffington Post, pickensplan.com)