[A-List] ... Big Coal's Dirty Plans

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

... for Our Energy Future (with shocking photos)

by Antrim Caskey

AlterNet (December 14 2007)

Just as the American people and the world are beginning to recognize the
necessity of shifting to renewable energies, Big Coal, in collusion with
an out-of-step administration, is pushing its dirty fossil fuel as the
solution to our nation's energy crisis.

Big Coal and its cohorts envision a "clean coal technology" future
fueled by liquifying and gasifying coal, capturing the carbon emissions
and injecting them underground. By 2030 the West Virginia Division of
Energy - a nascent state agency formed in July 2007 - wants to oust oil
and exalt coal by displacing the 1.3 billion gallons of foreign oil the
state currently imports every year.

The WVDoE believes "that higher energy prices are providing and will
continue to provide market opportunities" for a variety of alternative
coal technologies, including "coal waste, coal fines and coal bed
methane", according to a document released in December 2007 called "A
Blueprint for the Future".

But scientists and environmentalists say "clean coal" does not exist; it
is a misnomer and an oxymoron. The National Resources Defense Council
says that using the term "clean coal" makes about as much sense as
saying "safe cigarettes". The extraction and cleaning of coal inevitably
decimate ecosystems and communities.

Citing abundant supplies of quality domestic coal, escalating oil prices
that are hoving around $100 per barrel and security concerns raised by
dependence on foreign oil, the coal industry is chomping at the bit to
secure its stake in the false pursuit of domestic energy independence
through a federally assisted, coal-based economy. But as the world wakes
up to the climate crisis and people learn more about modern coal mining
and the continuing exploitation of Appalachia, which has sickened entire
communities, polluted the water and air, and condemned vast sections of
an ecologically extraordinary land to death, the coal industry faces an
increasingly uphill battle against growing public awareness and concern.

Just this year, plans for a dozen new coal plants in Texas, Florida,
Oklahoma, Minnesota, Kansas and others have been repudiated by the
growing public awareness and concern about the role of coal and other
fossil fuels in our climate crisis. Playing on stereotypes and employing
scare tactics about the unpredictability of the Middle East, the coal
industry is developing a Frankenstein-like future for US energy needs.

In Kansas, Governor Kathleen Sebelius recently blocked plans for two
coal-fired electricity plants; afterward, on November 5, a full page ad
in Kansas newspapers explained that now, because of Sebelius' decision,
"Kansas will import more natural gas from countries like Russia,
Venezuela and Iran". The ad displayed the grinning faces of the leaders
of these countries and continued, "Without new coal-fueled plants in our
state, experts predict that electric bills will skyrocket and Kansans
will be more dependent than ever on hostile, foreign energy sources". In
fact, Kansas exports natural gas to other states, and the United States
does not even import natural gas from Russia, Venezuela or Iran,
according to the US Department of Energy.


Why carbon capture is no safety net

Nationwide there are grandiose plans for more than 100 new coal-fired
power plants, but they all hinge on being able to sell the public and
legislators on outfitting and funding these new plants with carbon
capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. This process siphons off or
"captures" carbon dioxide before it can escape into the atmosphere,
contributing to acid rain, smog and warming the planet. The sequestered
carbon would then be pumped and stored underground.

But is it really possible to bury our daily carbon dioxide emission?
Australia's renown physicist, Karl Kruszelnicki, who is running for
public office on the Climate Change Coalition ticket, told the Sydney
Morning Herald on November 1, "One cubic kilometer of carbon dioxide to
get rid of every day? It's not possible! But they don't tell you that
that's what they've got to get rid of. They make reassuring noises that
they're spending millions looking for underground caverns. But I'm here
to tell you that they're not going to find it ... The point is that they
can only store 1,000th of one percent, not all their daily output."

Not only do we not have the capacity to store all the carbon dioxide we
produce, but the technology isn't there yet. The coal industry
acknowledges that CCS is fifteen years away, but continues to promulgate
the myth of "clean coal technology" and guide generous government
subsidies to themselves and to West Virginia universities, assigning
valuable research money to dirty technology. The Massachusetts Institute
of Technology's 2007 report "The Future of Coal" stated that "there is
no standard for measurement, monitoring, and verification of carbon
dioxide distribution. Duration of post-injection monitoring is an
unresolved issue."

In other words, Big Coal is betting on a pipe dream with an entire
ecosystem at stake. Adding CCS to plans for the more than 100 proposed
coal-fired power plants on the drawing board would increase operating
budgets by fifty percent to eighty percent. And the gasifying and
liquifying of coal into syn-gas and diesel would create potential
emissions twice as carbon-rich as petroleum-based gasoline or natural
gas. If Big Coal gets its way, the US Air Force will cruise the skies on
liquid coal fuel - spewing dangerously concentrated carbon dioxide into
our fragile atmosphere, and we'll be building more polluting plants
based on false promises from an outlaw industry.


Exacerbating the water crisis

To many observers, the next natural resource wars will be waged over
water, not oil or coal. People in the United States are waking up to the
reality of a looming water crisis, but the coal industry is still
advocating for a technology that is part of the problem, not the solution.

The US Department of Energy stated in December 2006 that the demand for
water to produce coal conversion fuels "threaten our limited water
supply". Coal conversion - gasification or liquefaction - requires an
absurd amount of fresh water. Each new integrated gasification combined
cycle (IGCC) or coal to liquid (CTL) plant will require millions of
gallons of fresh water every day. And these new plants will require even
more coal.

Big Coal's proposed plans will require a large increase in coal
extraction - at least fifteen percent more, though some reports quote as
high as a 45 percent increase in coal production would be necessary to
fuel "clean coal technology". The surge in demand for coal would be met
with a surge in mountaintop-removal coal mining, which means more water
pollution. Mountaintop-removal mining and the chemical cleaning of coal
also threatens Appalachian headwater streams, which are the drinking
water source for the southeastern United States - an area that has
endured frightening water shortages this year in Florida, Georgia and
South Carolina.

The coal-to-liquid plants that coal state politicians like Governor Joe
Manchin III of West Virginia and Governor Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky are
scrambling to site in their states would have one consequence that many
observers underestimate or ignore: the increase in production of coal
sludge - one of the least known and least regulated toxic wastes in the
United States - a direct threat to water supplies.

Ben Stout, a biologist from Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, West
Virginia, who testified in the landmark Bragg vs Robertson case, where
88 community members sued a coal operator for destroying their land, has
witnessed the environmental and human health devastation wreaked on the
unique mountain ecosystems and communities of Appalachia firsthand.

"Clean Coal Technologies is a misnomer", he said. "There's nothing clean
about coal. The extraction end is not addressed; if you live in southern
West Virginia, the landscape you grew up in has been destroyed and
rearranged. The question is, why are so many people in West Virginia so
desperate to get hooked up to county water supply?"

The answer is: toxic coal sludge. Coal sludge, laden with heavy metals
found in coal and released during extraction, like arsenic, chromium,
cadmium and mercury, has been pumped underground in West Virginia for
decades, with scant regulatory oversight. The sludge has intercepted
underground water tables, from which mountain communities draw their
drinking water. Coal sludge also contains carcinogenic chemicals like
floculants, which are used to process coal.

In West Virginia, the second-largest coal-producing state in the nation,
more than 470 mountaintops have been blown apart, 800 square miles of
the most diverse temperate hardwood forest razed and replaced with more
than 4,000 valley fills and 675 toxic coal sludge ponds. By 2012, the US
government estimates that we will have destroyed 2,500 square miles of
pristine Appalachia. Currently there are over 107 trillion gallons of
coal slurry stored or permitted to be stored in active West Virginia
"impoundments".

The total mechanization of coal extraction epitomized by mountaintop
removal/valley fill coal mining has buried thousands of miles of vital
headwater streams and pumped previously mined lands full of sludge. The
coal industry says that it has "elevated" some streams - after they've
buried them upstream - relocating them and "repurposing" them into
chemical spillways called National Pollution Discharge Elimination
System (NPDES) streams.

Coal sludge, the waste by-product of the chemical cleaning of coal in
preparation for shipping to market, is initially put into surface ponds,
but eventually this chemically concentrated, puddinglike waste leaches
into the groundwater. In southern West Virginia, where the largest seams
of coal lie, whole communities have been poisoned over years by mining
waste that has contaminated their drinking water.

Coal sludge is a disaster waiting to happen, like the 2.8 billion
gallons of toxic sludge that stand behind a 325-foot, leaking, unsound
dam of slate, 400 yards from the Marsh Fork Elementary School in
Sundial, West Virginia. Or Brushy Fork in Boone County, West Virginia,
one of the largest coal sludge dumps in the world, holding back nine
billion gallons of coal waste.

Sludge is also injected underground into the sprawling abandoned mine
works of decades past. Coal sludge is turning up in the water in Mingo
County, West Virginia, where documentation of this practice stretches
back for more than thirty years. Residents of Mingo County have suffered
catastrophic illness after the toxic sludge breached the local aquifers
that feed home wells. More than 650 of these residents have signed on to
a massive class-action lawsuit against the offending coal company,
Massey Energy.

Pursuing "clean coal technology" will cause an increase in the
production of coal and toxic coal waste, which contains dangerous levels
of arsenic, barium, cadmium, coper, iron, lead, manganese and zinc. In
some cases, there are no standards by which to measure contaminants
because some have never before been found in drinking water.

While scrubbers on smoke stacks have cleaned coal-fired power plant
emissions considerably, the cleaning on the combustion end causes the
processing of coal for market to be exponentially dirtier. The coal
going to market is cleaner-burning today, with lower sulfur and mercury
content, but these dangerous elements are left behind in the coal sludge
and in drinking water.


The dirty truth about "clean coal"

The environmental destruction caused by mountaintop-removal coal
extraction is just one of many reasons to immediately transition out of
coal. A plethora of substantial hurdles for the alternative coal
industry include technological uncertainties, billion-dollar budgets,
lack of project partners willing to invest in coal, growing concern
about carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, uncertainty about
future environmental regulations, rising constructions costs and an
array of water contamination issues.

But, we've been here before. In response to the energy crisis of the
1970s, the US government invested $15 billion in a failed attempt to
jump-start the coal-based synthetic fuel industry, including the
infamous 1.5 billion syn-fuel plant in Beulah, North Dakota. In the end,
the 1980s era attempt at coal gasification and liquefaction failed
miserably because of volatile oil prices bankrupting the nascent
industry, leaving taxpayers with a $330 million loss.

The newborn West Virginia Division of Energy - formed to put a better
face on coal - would like to institutionalize all possible
manifestations of coal production. The state agency says it would like
to surround coal extraction sites and the coal-fired power plants with
"additional advance coal opportunities" like the "production of ammonia
nitrate from coal, as well as nitrates for fertilizer".

These processes require the same copious amounts of water as CTL and
IGCC plants. WVDoE's outline for an energy future goes hand in hand with
what mountain people call the declaration of a "National Sacrifice Zone"
fueled by a plan to depopulate the coal-rich region of the southern
mountains. A similar strategy was publicly declared when the federal
government found uranium under Native American lands in the Four Corners
area in the 1970s. In the end, the uranium was deemed more important
than the land and the people; vast regions of Native American lands were
declared "National Sacrifice Zones", and people were forced from their
homelands.

Massey Energy's CEO, Don Blankenship, recently suggested the idea of a
far-reaching coal industrial complex upon releasing a statement
regarding the purchase of vast parcels of coal lands, increasing
Massey's reserve holding to 100 million tons in northern Appalachia.
"This region is becoming increasingly important to the coal and energy
industry, and this transaction will enable us to take advantage of the
growth in demand for northern Appalachian coal", he said. Massey's newly
acquired coal lands are in West Virginia, across the Ohio River from
Meigs County, Ohio, where a notorious cluster of coal-fired power plants
are concentrated.

And momentum is building in the region. At a coal-to-liquids conference
in Beckley, West Virginia, in August this year, US Senator Jay
Rockefeller sent word to the crowd saying, "We need the equivalent of
the Apollo and Manhattan Projects that would provide billions in federal
funding for research and development so that the best and brightest
engineers and scientific minds can tackle carbon capture sequestration
and CTL development".

It is time to stop the momentum and break our coal habit. Instead we
need an Apollo and Manhattan project to replace coal with solar, wind
and geothermal, or our kids will be stuck cleaning up after the dirtiest
energy industry. Coal companies are notorious for leaving their mess behind.

"The worst offenders declare bankruptcy, opting to clear their plate of
financial obligations and skip town", says Earthjustice attorney Lisa
Evans. "Residents are left with poisoned soil and water; taxpayers are
stuck with a hefty cleanup bill". Only three percent to five percent of
West Virginia mined lands have been reclaimed and developed - the
Twisted Gun Golf Course in Mingo County, Mt View High School in McDowell
County and a FBI complex in Clarksburg, West Virginia, are all built on
unstable, previously mined lands - but the lands can never be truly
reclaimed because of the extent of the destruction. Large-scale surface
mining has converted forests to grasslands, resulting in a loss of
carbon sequestration capacity of approximately 1.4 million acres,
according to Stout.

When Big Coal talks about economic benefits of CTL, they talk about how
cheap raw coal is and how we need to stick with cheap energy. But it
avoids talking about the budgets in the multibillions, the fact that CCS
is unproven and untested commercially, and the externalities of
extracting coal: the decimation of Appalachia's ecosystems and communities.

It is impossible to estimate the true cost of coal in a dollar figure -
how do you calculate the destruction of animal habitats, forests, fresh
water, heritage, family history, hometowns, livelihoods and personal
health? When you add it all up, coal costs too much!

The plunder and destruction of West Virginia began with a plan in 1760
called the Great Land Grab, when a small group of wealthy Americans
plotted to buy the coal-rich lands out from under the mountain people
who didn't know the value of what was beneath their homes. Today, coal
advocates ignore the global climate crisis, while pushing untested
coal-based technology and scaring Americans about our dependence on
foreign oil, hoping to fuel the planet with their coal, regardless of
the consequences.

No matter what, the immediate transition away from coal is necessary and
inevitable, as is a moratorium on all new coal-fired power plants. The
world is coming to understand the impacts of dirty energies like coal
and the need for sustainable, renewable, clean energy. James Hansen, the
leading climate scientist at NASA, who shared the Nobel Prize this year
with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), testified as
a private citizen at the Iowa Utilities board and said, "Coal will
determine whether we continue to increase climate change or slow human
impact".

The coal industry's proposed path to a coal-based energy independent
future for the United States is like laying down a sixteen-lane
superhighway through the bedrooms of coal-rich regions like Appalachia.
"Clean coal technology" would require a sizable increase in coal
extraction, and for the mountain communities of Central Appalachia,
already suffering under the mountaintop removal/valley fill coal-mining
campaign, "clean coal technology" is a highway to hell. We have a choice
- let's build a new road to renewable energy and sustainable communities.

_____

Antrim Caskey is a Brooklyn-based independent photojournalist who has
been reporting on the human and environmental costs of Mountaintop
Removal/Valley Fill coal mining since May 2005.

Copyright (c) 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

http://www.alternet.org/story/70475/


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