Can Clean Coal Live Up To Donald Trump’s Promise On Jobs?

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The foundation of Trump’s energy policy rests on fossil fuels; oil from pipelines, natural gas from fracking, and coal. Trump is a strong believer in clean coal technology and boasted that he would lift restrictions on the technology.

But while Trump has targeted environmental protections that could impact coal production, the narrative that the U.S. Government has, in the past, been completely against coal isn’t quite right. Instead, the government has spent a lot of money in an effort to make clean coal work, and for good reason: Thousands of American jobs and hundreds of communities depend on the coal industry to survive. But coal’s greatest enemy isn’t the EPA: It’s the free market and not even coal barons think Trump can bring coal jobs back.

The Vague Costs Of Coal

For some Americans, their livelihoods depend on coal. 174,000 Americans make a living off coal, whether they mine it, transport it, or burn it for power. Kentucky and West Virginia, in particular, are faced with a tough problem, as the $24 per hour coal mining pays, on average, is a living wage for a family of four with one working adult. The death of coal, for these Americans, likely means the death of their communities and a transition to jobs with far less robust earning potential. When they can even find those.

Conversely, though, coal is an ecological disaster. Burning it not only creates air pollution,but also other contaminants like mercury, and leaves behind a potentially toxic ash that needs to be either disposed of or recycled. Reversing regulations supposedly restricting coal can’t help the fuel’s public relations problem.

Clean coal technology is designed to address the pollution issue by capturing the various greenhouse gasses, such as carbon dioxide, to keep them out of the atmosphere. The theory is that if you can clean up coal’s reputation, you can save the jobs, and perhaps even grow the industry again.

The problem with that scenario is that, while there are supposed to be three viable ways to trap those emissions — freeing them before the coal is burned, burning the coal in a high-oxygen environment, or capturing them after the coal burns — clean coal technology has had trouble transitioning from academic theory to the real world. The issue, as clean coal technology expert Dr. Rajender Gupta of the University of Alberta explains to Uproxx, is scale:

“There’s lots of carbon capture technologies that can reduce emissions, but they’re expensive,” Gupta told us. “They can come down to lower prices if they’re adapted at large scale. There are more coming up, as well, that can capture at a much cheaper price. Cost is the important thing, and cost can only be reduced if it’s done more frequently.”

Indeed, clean coal’s problem has again and again been cost. Germany’s Schwarze Pumpe (Black Pump) station attempted to use a technology called oxyfuel in 2006, where coal is burned in a rich-oxygen environment to make CO2 easier to capture but they discontinued the program due to the high costs and the energy needed. Canada’s SaskPower debuted their Boundary Dam project which captured CO2 from coal to great fanfare in 2014, but serious problems with both the system’s design and the financial aspects mired the project in scandal. There were also estimates that it doubled the cost of electricity generated at the facility.

In America, the best example of this is the would-be clean coal pilot facility in Kemper County, Mississippi. The facility started as an Obama administration project, in 2010, and was due to open in 2014 with the goal of demonstrating a clean coal technology called “integrated gasification combined cycle” or IGCC. In IGCC, coal is turned into pressurized gas, called syngas. The pollutants can be more easily filtered out, and thus the coal will burn more effectively.

Kemper sounds like an ideal facility, but the clean coal aspects of the project is still not online and the facility has overrun its cost by billions. But Kemper still generates power. It just generates it with what turns out to be clean coal’s mortal enemy: natural gas.

The Low Price Of Gas

It turns out the biggest problem coal faces is that it’s just cheaper to burn natural gas. When we spoke to Dr. Henry Jacoby, who studies the economics of energy for MIT, he explained that the real problem isn’t America’s taste for green energy, but rather cheap natural gas:

“I wouldn’t say coal is expensive in the US, if you look at the market costs. It’s trading off against natural gas, and there was a lot of excess natural gas capacity when fracking came along. Natural gas prices dropped from $15 to $2.50. We have deregulated markets, so nuclear and coal couldn’t compete.”

Hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, has its own batch of environmental and safety concerns, but at its most basic, the economics are better than coal. Fracking has made it cheaper, and in some areas possible, to extract billions of cubic feet of natural gas, meaning there’s far more supply than anyone anticipated.

As it’s difficult to ship natural gas in the first place, most natural gas is piped to nearby power plants, reducing the transit costs. While hardly environmentally friendly, burning natural gas generates less pollution than coal and oil burning plants. Still, there is some truth to the notion that government regulation increases the cost of coal, as Dr. Jacoby explains to us:

“The controls put on toxic releases made coal more expensive. We’ve imposed mercury regulation, and the kind of adjustments you have to make for those laws drive up costs. We don’t penalize coal by saying you have to tax it, but we do drive up the price of using coal by having technical corrections.”

Still, even if you reversed every regulation, a politically dicey proposition at best, coal would still be faced with the fact that not only is natural gas still lower, but an even cheaper competitor is coming along.

Fighting The Sun

Renewables no longer need an environmental argument; they’re simply too cheap and easy for anyone to argue with. Solar power alone has seen the cost of generation plunge while the efficiency has skyrocketed. The wind generation industry has doubled in size over the last fifteen years and seems likely to keep expanding at a torrid pace. And if Trump tries to mess with renewable energy, he’ll likely find opposition in surprising places: Wind farms are commonplace in Republican strongholds, and solar power is most popular in Republican states like Arizona and Utah.

Renewables aren’t perfect, of course. They only generate when the wind blows and the sun shines, and that means you still need power plants from other sources to create what’s called baseload power. Germany, for example, has aggressively expanded its renewable energy, but at the same time, it’s phasing out its nuclear plants, leaving only coal plants. You’d think this means coal plants win, but in fact, Germany’s situation makes the issue even worse for coal. Since you can’t just burn coal only when you need it, power plants on networks with a lot of renewables can “go negative,” meaning they are literally paying people to take their electricity. As a result, energy companies are looking into battery technology to store power and keep their margins alive.

Another problem, from the coal industry’s perspective, is that the idea of one giant power plant giving energy to the surrounding area is on the way out. In a 2015 interview, Steve Holliday, CEO for National Grid, a power company in the UK and northeastern US, explained that the idea of “baseload” power will matter less and less:

The world is clearly moving towards much more distributed electricity production and towards microgrids. The pace of that development is uncertain. That depends on political decisions, regulatory incentives, consumer preferences, technological developments. But the direction is clear.

Catering to Holliday’s point, Elon Musk recently announced his company SolarCity would be producing roof shingles that double as solar panels. Musk’s pitch has nothing to do with solar power, either; his tiles were built to fix the economic problems inherent in roof shingles, making them cheaper to put on a house even if they’re never wired to the grid. Those will arrive this summer.

Adding to the pressure is that coal power plants are closing simply because they’re aging, and new plants aren’t being built. The vast majority of American coal-burning plants were built before Ronald Reagan took office and would be due to be torn down even if coal wasn’t struggling with cost. For example, the Navajo Generating Plant, one of the largest coal plants in America with a related mine complex, is facing closure, and their lease requires them to tear down the plant if it’s not extended past 2019. The US Department of Energy notes that the issue is simple economics:

Electricity produced at NGS is currently more expensive than electricity purchased on the wholesale spot market. Price trends examined in this analysis suggest a turnaround might be years away, especially if natural gas prices remain low.

The report goes on to note that the facility’s ability to stay competitive hinges almost entirely on the future of natural gas.

For all the talk about “clean” energy and green initiatives, the truth is that powering our world is a messy and dangerous business. Fracking is terrifying communities and has a laundry list of ecological problems. But nonetheless, for now, it’s cheap enough many can ignore them.

Going into the future, the only sure bet seems to be that society will rally around the solution that’s cheapest and makes us feel slightly better about paying for the electricity we’ll burn. While people may insist coal is the backbone of America and the beating heart of countless communities, actions and dollars speak louder than words. Clean coal solves the PR problem, but it raises the cos. If Obama spent years and billions to wind up with a clean coal plant that burns natural gas instead, it’s difficult to see what Trump could change.

Politicians are always quick to appeal to the heart, and there is a genuine concern here: Thousands of Americans are counting on political will and modern technology to save their livelihoods and their communities. But despite the promises of returned prosperity, decades of political waffling and bad PR has turned coal into a technological relic. If politicians don’t recognize that reality, and take bold steps to fix it, it’ll be the Americans depending on coal that pay the price.

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