By Betsy Monseu

Coal is under pressure in the United States, and not the natural kind of pressure involved in its creation from plant material. The pressure coal is under today is of a distinctly unnatural kind, shaped by an increasingly far-reaching and unbalanced regulatory agenda. The energy playing field continues to be tilted away from coal, a primary target of that agenda. Yet coal's leading position as a critical fuel in the electricity marketplace continues. Though its share of that marketplace has generally been trending down over the past several years, coal remains the largest of any fuel source for electric generation. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts coal to retain the leading position in 2015 as well as over the longer term – including a 34 percent share in 2040.

Article title: Coal's Place in the Energy and Electricity Space
Reference: ELECTR6182
Journal title: The Electricity Journal
Corresponding author: Ms. Betsy Monseu
First author: Ms. Betsy Monseu
Final version published online: 3-AUG-2015 Full bibliographic details: The
Electricity Journal 28 (2015), pp. 104-111 DOI information:
10.1016/j.tej.2015.06.002

The final Clean Power Plan continues EPA’s execution of President Obama’s legacy climate change agenda. It is a risky, expensive, and misguided regulatory scheme, devoid of any real climate impact. The increased emphasis on inefficient, intermittent renewables for electricity generation in the final plan only intensifies concerns about grid reliability. The Energy Information Administration projected closure of 90 gigawatts of coal capacity under EPA’s proposed plan. That’s nearly one third of the existing coal fleet, and that number is likely to rise under the final rule. With such drastic reductions, coal plants will be far less available to back up renewables or to buffer spiking natural gas prices.

The rule will impose enormous and unnecessary burdens on states, businesses, and families. It will raise electricity prices, disproportionately affecting those who can least afford it and driving American business and manufacturing offshore.

It’s a good thing I finally went public last week with my long-held view that Democrat investors were going to snap up coal companies driven to bankruptcy by Obama’s war on coal.

The day after I made my prediction, news came that leftist billionaire George Soros had purchased shares of the two largest U.S. coal companies, Peabody Energy and Arch Coal. Now comes news that bankrupt Patriot Coal is being purchased in a $400 million deal led by Tom Clarke, a prominent Virginia-based environmentalist.

But Clarke’s purchase of Patriot brings a new — and likely fraudulent — twist to what I called "Obama’s Great Coal Train Robbery."

The EPA claims its Clean Power Plan will end up saving lives from reducing air pollution, but a new report by a free market energy group warns the agency’s global warming rule will end up killing more than it saves.

"The EPA’s climate rule has no discernible impact on climate change and may cause thousands of premature deaths in the United States," according to a recent report by the free market Institute for Energy Research (IER). "The EPA relies on faulty data to make exaggerated claims about the benefits of a rule that will cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars and plunge millions of families into poverty."

"The loss of disposable income due to higher energy bills will leave families with less money to spend on health care, prescriptions, and other essentials. Therefore, EPA should withdraw its expensive and harmful carbon regulation," according to IER’s report.

I was disheartened to see Nithin Coca’s recent article make use of the tired epithet "dirty coal" to attack an energy resource that – despite recent market difficulties – continues to provide this country with almost 40% of its electricity needs. Unfortunately the term "dirty coal" conveniently and simplistically ignores the real-life use of technology that makes coal increasingly clean today.

The coal industry has been at the forefront of efforts to reduce emissions, investing billions of dollars in efficiency upgrades and installing billions more in emissions reduction equipment. In fact, research by Energy Ventures Analysis showed that by 2015, the industry had invested over $136 billion in clean coal technologies, and plans to continue investing a further $10 billion by the end of 2017. As a result, there are many examples of clean coal technologies operating throughout the U.S. and the world, which have proved to be very effective at reducing emissions.

Third-generation coal miner Kent Parrish was blown away the first time he saw a Wyoming coal mine.

"Seventy-five to a hundred foot coal seams!" he said, peering down in the huge black pit of the Eagle Butte coal mine, north of Gillette. "If we hit a six foot seam back home, we thought we hit the motherlode."

Parrish is originally from West Virginia, but Appalachian mines have been hit hard by a recent downturn in the coal market. West Virginia has lost a quarter of its coal mining jobs since 2011.

The panic set in around 2010. The trigger words: China, monopoly, national security, iPhones.

Yes, iPhones, whose signature features — the sleek display, their sound quality — draw their properties from rare earth elements, a 15-chunk block of lanthanides at the base of the periodic table, plus the metals scandium and yttrium. By 2010, China had cornered nearly 95 percent of the world’s production of rare earths and had begun to choke exports, which caused prices to skyrocket.

Back in his lab at the University of Kentucky, Jim Hower, a geologist, started to see a wave of interest in his research like never before. Mr. Hower has been sampling slabs of Appalachian coal and its waste products and cataloging their rare earth element concentrations for years.

Central Appalachian coal — mined in parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee and once prized for its low sulfur content and is now the most difficult and least economic to mine — also holds the most rare earth element "hot spots" in the country, according to research compiled by Ohio-based Leonardo Technologies for the federal government.

Twenty-nine states, more than half the stars on the American flag, have filed lawsuits against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for redefining the "Waters of the United States," or WOTUS. EPA rewrote the law, erasing "navigable" and usurping states’ rights by including local seasonal streams, farm irrigation ponds, roadside ditches, and even "connective" dry lands placed under authority of the Clean Water Act.

The WOTUS rule, published the morning of June 29, potentially subjects every food, energy, transportation and manufacturing industry in the nation to high-handed regulation by one of the most reviled and least trusted federal agencies, dreaded for its cadre of "revolving door" officials hired from anti-industry green groups.

A 30-year-old mining technique is becoming all that’s keeping a group of U.S. coal producers from joining their competitors in bankruptcy.

Coal, already locked in a battle with cheap natural gas, now faces federal environmental rules that threaten to reduce its share of power generation to the lowest in 66 years. Companies from Illinois to Northern Appalachia are responding by leaning more heavily than ever on longwall-mining, a technology that’ll be used to produce a quarter of America’s coal this year, up from 19 percent in 2013.

Investors are backing the miners who rely on the efficient approach. Think of a giant deli slicer with multiple revolving blades that cuts coal from a seam into slices. Eighty percent of analysts covering Foresight Energy LP and CNX Coal Resources LP, both known for longwall operations, recommend buying their shares, compared with less than a third for producers who use it less, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Not so long ago, the American economy practically ran on coal. In 2005, coal-fired power plants supplied half of the nation’s electricity—far more than any other energy source. But this year, the figure has dropped to 34%.

Tough air pollution rules written during Obama’s first term have shuttered dozens of coal plants that emitted too much mercury and other toxins. Taking their place? Plants that run on cleaner burning natural gas—which has become cheap and abundant, thanks to the fracking boom.

Richland Community College is currently engaged in the USA Department of Energy project "Illinois-Industry Carbon Capture and Storage" (IL-ICCS), which is to demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of commercial-scale carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS). This project began in June 2010 with a project team of four partners selected by the U.S. Department of Energy—National Energy Technology Laboratory (DOE-NETL). These partners include: Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM), serving as the IL-ICCS principal investigator; Schlumberger Carbon Services; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign–Illinois State Geological Survey Division; and Richland Community College (RCC).

The participation of RCC enabled the project to leverage its educational mission and its relationship with the Decatur, Illinois, region to facilitate the offering of education and outreach for local, regional, and international K-12, higher education, professional, and community audiences.

President Obama's new environmental guidelines will likely curb coal-generated power. Gov. Matt Mead tells NPR's Rachel Martin what this means for Wyoming, the nation's biggest coal producer.

Coal carload volumes originated on US railroads stayed above the 100,000 mark for the third straight week and reached a total not seen since March, Association of American Railroads data showed Wednesday.

For the week ending August 8, the AAR reported 105,965 coal carloads, up 5.3% from the prior week but down 7.1% from the year-ago week.