BIG COAL: Reviews

June 25, 2006

'Big Coal,' by Jeff Goodell

Black Cloud

By COREY S. POWELL

There is perhaps no greater act of denial in modern life than sticking a plug into an electric outlet. No thinking person can eat a hamburger without knowing it was once a cow, or drink water from the tap without recognizing, at least dimly, that its journey began in some distant reservoir. Electricity is different. Fully sanitized of any hint of its origins, it pours out of the socket almost like magic.
In his new book, Jeff Goodell breaks the spell with a single number: 20. That's how many pounds of coal each person in the United States consumes, on average, every day to keep the electricity flowing. Despite its outdated image, coal generates half of our electricity, far more than any other source. Demand keeps rising, thanks in part to our appetite for new electronic gadgets and appliances; with nuclear power on hold and natural gas supplies tightening, coal's importance is only going to increase. As Goodell puts it, "our shiny white iPod economy is propped up by dirty black rocks."

Coal has become near-synonymous with electricity because it is cheap and abundant. A pile of coal containing one million B.T.U.'s worth of energy costs $1.70. The equivalent amount of natural gas runs about $9. All electricity looks the same, so why pay more? Even by Goodell's explicitly conservative estimates, America has enough coal to keep its power plants humming for decades to come. And compared with prospecting for oil, finding the black rock is a snap. In Wyoming's Powder River basin the coal seams run 50 to 100 feet thick and lie so close to the surface they can be scoured in open-pit mines.

Unfortunately, coal is also dirty and dangerous. One of the highlights of "Big Coal" is Goodell's outraged account of the catastrophic 2002 flooding of a mine in Quecreek, Pa., run by PBS Coals. His story follows Randy Fogle and Blaine Mayhugh, two of nine workers who survived. Mayhugh, shattered by the experience, left to become a maintenance engineer at a wind farm. Fogle, who came from a long line of miners, returned to the work that had already taken the lives of his grandfather and his wife's grandfather. PBS Coals eventually paid a $14,100 fine for negligence that may have triggered the accident while receiving more than $500,000 from the state for costs associated with the rescue operation.

In the world of coal, that counts as a happy ending. About a month ago, an underground explosion killed five workers in Kentucky's Darby Mine No. 1. Coming on the heels of the widely publicized deaths of 12 workers in another coal mine explosion in Sago, W.Va., on Jan. 2, the latest mishap has everyone from Ted Kennedy to Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky crying out for better mine safety. There's a long way to go. More than 104,000 Americans died digging out coal between 1900 and 2005; twice as many may have died from black lung. The fatality rate in coal mining is almost 60 percent higher than it is in oil and gas extraction.

For all that, mining coal probably takes a lot fewer lives than burning it. Although coal-fired power plants generally keep getting cleaner, they contribute about three-fifths of all sulfur dioxide, one-third of all mercury, and one-fifth of all nitrogen oxide emissions in the United States. Air pollution's precise health effects are notoriously hard to quantify, but its links to heart attacks, lung disease and cancer are well established. "Big Coal" includes a chilling quotation from Joel Schwartz, a public health researcher who produced some of the first detailed studies of the toxic effects of air pollution: "I see more people dying of particle air pollution than are dying of AIDS, and I need to call people's attention to that."

Goodell's journey inevitably leads to the most dramatic and contentious consequence of coal consumption, global warming. Coal accounts for nearly 40 percent of America's carbon dioxide emissions; it provides more than two-thirds of the energy for China, the world's fastest-opening CO2 spigot. Most climate scientists agree that global temperatures are likely to increase between 2 degrees and 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the coming century. Such warming could trigger a sea-level rise of two to seven feet, coastal flooding, extreme weather and regional drought. Just protecting the United States coast against rising waters would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

So what is to be done? Goodell's writing, so fiery and committed through the narrative parts of "Big Coal," turns oddly tentative when it comes time to endorse solutions. He waves off green dreams like wind and solar electricity. He pins much of his hopes on a kind of national psychotherapy program to "change our thinking" and "make the invisible visible," which translates into a vague endorsement of new emissions taxes and regulations.

Goodell does identify two specific, promising solutions: carbon trading and carbon sequestration. Carbon trading defines the cost of pumping carbon dioxide into the air and lets the market choose the best way to reduce emissions. Sequestration is an experimental technique for snatching carbon dioxide out of the power plant and pumping it into the ground — a technique that dovetails with a highly efficient new way of burning coal, known as the integrated gassification combined cycle.

These are plausible near-term strategies, but Goodell ignores other technologies that could radically rewrite the rules of the energy game. Coal can be used to synthesize hydrogen, for instance. That in itself isn't much of a solution — the process still emits carbon dioxide — but once the infrastructure is in place it would become much easier to use solar and wind power (or nuclear, for that matter) to make zero-carbon hydrogen.

Looking farther ahead, fusion might provide the kind of clean, abundant power that could finally wean us off finite fossil fuels. Last month the European Union, Russia, Japan, China, India, South Korea and the United States signed an agreement to build an experimental thermonuclear reactor in southern France starting in 2007. Even if it succeeds, the $5.9 billion reactor will be just a proof of concept, with commercial fusion power still decades away. But if we don't reach for such lofty goals, we may eventually find ourselves moving past denial into the next stage: depression.

June 21, 2006

Books of The Times | 'Big Coal'

The Promise and Problems of Those Dirty Black Rocks

By WILLIAM GRIMES

With oil prices soaring and the Middle East in turmoil, it may be some comfort to know that the United States is sitting on gargantuan reserves of fossil fuel. That's the good news. The bad news is that it's coal.

Just how bad is laid out emphatically in "Big Coal," Jeff Goodell's compelling indictment of one of the country's biggest, most powerful and most antiquated industries. Coal, he argues, is bad for the economy, bad for public health and especially bad for the environment, yet its future looks quite bright. It is relatively cheap. It is plentiful. And Americans, who get half their electric power from coal-burning generators, are addicted to it. As of 2005, more than 120 new coal-burning plants were either planned or under construction in the United States.

"We may not like to admit it," Mr. Goodell writes, "but our shiny white iPod economy is propped up by dirty black rocks."

Mr. Goodell, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, considers coal at three points in its life cycle. He travels to West Virginia and Wyoming to see how it is mined and transported by rail to generating plants around the country. He watches it being burned and transformed into electricity. Finally, he weighs the environmental effects of releasing huge amounts of sulfur and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the more than one billion tons of coal burned every year in the United States, and billions more around the world. Seen from any angle, coal looks ugly.

There is a price to pay for cheap electricity. In places like New York, San Francisco and Boston, the hidden costs remain hidden. But Mr. Goodell heads out to towns like Madison, W. Va., where companies now go after coal by blasting the tops off mountains and dumping them into rivers and valleys. Deforestation has led to devastating freak floods. The mountaintop debris, which leaches acid and heavy metals into streams, was helpfully upgraded from "waste" to "fill" by the current Bush administration, removing a big legal obstacle to new mining operations.

Mr. Goodell retraces, vividly and concisely, the sorry history of West Virginia coal mining, now in its twilight era. The big mining companies, after squeezing the easy money out of the state, have moved to the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, where low-sulfur coal can be strip-mined, and the industry is booming. Meanwhile, back in old-coal country, nonunion subcontractors cut corners and push workers to the limit to scratch out a few more tons of fuel from nearly depleted mines.

Coal mining in the United States, Mr. Goodell argues, is a greedy, dirty business with an appalling record on worker safety and environmental pollution. A 19th-century industry, it has faced the challenges of the 21st century largely by digging in its heels and looking resolutely backward. Its chief enablers have been pliant politicians, softened up with lots of money, and an often craven regulatory bureaucracy. This Bush administration in particular has gone out of its way to make life comfortable for big coal, and Mr. Goodell, citing chapter and verse, takes it to task effectively.

Mr. Goodell waxes wroth on global warming. Big coal, faced with mounting evidence that carbon dioxide emissions have contributed hugely to increases in planetary temperatures, resolutely decided to shoot the messengers. Rather than looking at cleaner technology, companies have concentrated on discrediting the science behind global warming, forming the Information Council on the Environment to label global warming a theory rather than a fact. An industry-financed video, "The Greening of Planet Earth," suggests that warmer temperatures will lead to unprecedented abundance, as deserts turn into lush farmland. Unbelievably, this campaign has proved to be highly effective.

Mr. Goodell hits hard but fights fair, for the most part. He concedes that big coal has made some progress over the years. He wants to see it make more, especially by embracing a new technology called integrated gasification combined cycle, which cooks off the impurities in coal before turning it into a synthetic gas that is then captured and burned in a turbine. Generators using this method can burn coal nearly as cleanly as natural gas, but the process is more expensive. And this is where the rubber meets the road.

Are Americans willing to pay 20 to 25 percent more to turn on a light or cool their homes? Here the hardheaded Mr. Goodell goes a little soft. Essentially, he is asking average consumers to dig deeper and pay more now for vaguely perceived future benefits. Present pain for future gain does not usually add up to a winning political selling point, so to get it across, Mr. Goodell makes wild promises. A total commitment to clean energy could, he argues, "unleash a jobs bonanza that would make what happened in Silicon Valley in the 1990's look like a bake sale." How this will come about remains a little mysterious. It just will.

Mr. Goodell should simply admit that there's no free lunch. The United States has enjoyed a free energy ride for a century and more, and the coal companies have made out like bandits all along the way. Now the day of reckoning has come. We — and, in a just world, they — are going to pay a price, either today or tomorrow. Mr. Goodell, in this well-written, timely and powerful book, makes it crystal clear what the stakes are.

The ever growing buzz over alternative energy source received a major boost last January, when President Bush confessed to America’s oil addiction in his State of the Union Address. But since then, amidst all the speculation about a cleaner, greener tomorrow, one thing has been notably absent: an honest assessment of where we are now, and where current trends show us going in the coming years. In his forthcoming book Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future, author Jeff Goodell paints a key piece of this picture. As he illustrates, the coal industry is booming, a reality with implications for the global climate, human health, and the consolidation of the energy sector. Recently, TAP spoke by phone with Goodell about the future of coal and its role in American life.

How does this coal boom differ, in your view, from the previous resource booms you have studied?

There is an urgency in the debate about energy today that we haven't seen before. There’s a lot of talk about peak oil, and you can argue about when exactly that peak will come, but in recent years, I think its really begun to hit people that fossil fuels are finite. So there’s a real push to find new sources of power, and to imagine how we will carry on after we run out of cheap oil and gas. The other thing is the war in Iraq. American soldiers are dying right now because of our addiction to oil. Not surprisingly, this is driving a renewed interest in energy independence. Coal, of course, is a huge domestic asset; the United States has about 25 percent of the world’s recoverable coal reserves, some 270 billion tons, within our borders.

In your book, you discuss how some coal mining towns become "dependent on the very things that might kill them," since the coal industry is the only economic game in town. When the coal industry threatens that there could be job losses with more regulation, how do you argue with that?

It's a very difficult situation. The coal industry has long used a kind of economic blackmail to get their way -- "loosen regulations or we'll shut down the mines and move out." West Virginia and Kentucky are the most vivid examples of how this works. These two states have been decimated by the boom and bust cycle of the coal industry, which over the years has been very good at keeping other industries out of the coalfields. Being the sole job creator in an area, they are able to say to residents, “Do you want to feed your family? Do you want to put food on the table? Well, then you’ve got to keep us around.” The problem is, the coal industry has not made these regions economically prosperous. It has often made them sick, fearful, and dependent. The coalfields are at the bottom of national rankings in a whole range of categories, from education to unemployment to clean water. There are economically prosperous regions in West Virginia and Kentucky, for sure -- West Virginia has a booming biotech industry -- but they are in areas where coal mining is not.

You spent three years writing this book, and as you note, during that time the American Lung Association estimates that 72,000 people died prematurely from the effects of coal-fired power plant pollution. If this is the case, then where’s the public outrage?

It’s true that there is very little outrage -- certainly not on a level proportionate to the problem – and there are a number of reasons for that. One is that, in many regions of the country, the air has gotten cleaner, and that's a good thing. But fact is, air pollution is not like a car crash. There isn't often blood on the highway. Except in regions where air pollution is quite severe, the negative health impacts of coal plant emissions manifest themselves gradually, over a period of years. So it requires complex, long-term epidemiological studies to make the health connections. But those connections have been made, the science is solid and peer-reviewed, and the premature deaths from air pollution are real.

The other thing is that, as I mention near the outset of the book, there’s an immense and, at times, willful ignorance in America about what goes on behind the light switch. Nowadays, people can tell you exactly what they paid for their last gallon of gas, but they’re clueless when it comes to electricity. Most people don’t know what a kilowatt is, let alone what it costs. So the connection between coal and public health doesn’t always come easily.

Coal industry executives and some politicians like to say that we have more than 250 years worth of coal left in the ground in America. At current coal prices, does the research that geologists have done bear this out?

Yes, theoretically, it’s true that we do have 250 years of coal left, and the coal boosters just love to tout this figure. But you’ll notice that no one making that claim talks about exactly where that coal is, or what it take to get it out of the ground. In places like mid-Appalachia, production is already starting to decline, while in other areas -- Montana for example -- the coal may be abundant, but much of it is too dirty to burn, or too far from any railroads, or it is buried in inconvenient places, like under schools or national parks. So yes, we have the coal, but what will be the human, economic and environmental costs of getting it out of the ground?

As coal prices go up, marginal coal becomes more profitable to mine, but it doesn't change the essential fact that we've been burning coal in America for more than 150 years now, and all the easy-to-get stuff is gone. What's left is increasingly difficult, destructive, and dangerous to extract.

Can you talk about the current coal boom in the context of the carbon dioxide levels that many scientists believe are allowable if we want to prevent major climate disruptions?

Close to 40 percent of America’s CO2 emissions come from coal. Since 1990, CO2 emissions from coal plants have risen more than 25 percent. To avoid dangerous climate change, many scientists suggest we need to cut emissions by more than 50 percent by 2050. So, clearly, if we continue to burn coal at the rate we do today, getting a handle on global warming will be nearly impossible. The picture is very bleak, actually. According to projections by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the equivalent of 1400 1,000-megawatt power plants will be built in the world by 2030. In America, as of 2005, there were 120 coal-fired power plants proposed in about 30 states. And these are mostly conventional plants with extremely high CO2 emissions. So addressing the threat of global warming will require the large-scale adoption of cleaner technology. That's beginning to happen, but nowhere near fast enough.

Speaking of cleaner technology, some politicians, President Bush included, have been singing the praises of coal gasification recently. What is this process, how widespread is it, and what can the government do to speed its adoption?

Coal gasification (also known as integrated gasification combined cycle, or IGCC) uses heat and pressure to transform coal into a synthetic gas, which can then be used for a variety of purposes, including generating electricity. There are a number of advantages to IGCC plants over conventional combustion coal plants -- they are more efficient, they use 40 percent less water, they emit significantly less air pollution. But the biggest advantage is that it's far easier and more economical to capture and eventually sequester CO2 from these new plants.

The fate of IGCC as a successful technology to reduce CO2 emissions really hinges on our ability to sequester large quantities of carbon dioxide underground. In order to make a real difference in the net CO2 in the atmosphere, we'd have to pump hundreds of millions of tons underground every year, and then figure out ways to keep it there. This is an enormous undertaking, and one that scientists and the industry are just beginning to explore.

There is also a cultural problem in the coal industry. This is a group of people who have been burning rocks for 150 years. To adopt IGCC would be to embrace an entirely new technology, and for many, this is an intimidating prospect.

Given that China, currently in the throes of an economic boom, relies so heavily on coal and is likely to continue to do so, what can the United States do the minimize the environmental and health-related consequences?

There’s no doubt that China is a major concern. More than 70 percent of China's electricity comes from coal, and if it continues on its current path the chances of avoiding major climate disruption are slim. But who are we to scold them? Per capita, the U.S. burns three times as much coal as China. In addition, the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that make global warming such a concern are mostly the result of the industrialization of the west -- we created the problem, and so we have a moral responsibility to lead the way in addressing it. When we demand -- as many coal and electric power industry CEO's do -- that we can't do anything about our emissions unless China does something about theirs, we end up simply looking like hypocrites.

That said, the single best thing we can do to advance the uptake of new technology for power generation in China would be to push harder for its rapid deployment here. America has the creativity, the engineering know-how, the financial resources. The U.S. should be leading a revolution in green tech, attracting new investments, creating new jobs. Instead, our basic strategy is simply to burn more coal and wag our fingers at the Chinese. This is not a strategy of optimism and entrepreneurialism. It is a strategy of denial.

Big Coal was published on June 8th, 2006, by Houghton Mifflin Books.