From Stark
Some industry analysts are questioning earlier assumptions about increased Chinese demand for imported coal — a demand that is the basis of SSA Marine’s plan for the Gateway Pacific Terminal coal and bulk cargo export pier at Cherry Point in Whatcom County.
In this report from the Financial Times, reporter Leslie Hook notes that some experts now expect China to make the investments needed to better develop and transport its own ample coal reserves.
Meanwhile, cheap natural gas is helping to curb demand for coal in the U.S. Arch Coal recently announced layoffs in its Appalachian coal mines. Here’s an AP report on that, via Fox.
UPDATE: On Sunday, the Vancouver Columbian published a lengthy overview of the coal export situation.
This seems to bolster that premise: http://daily.sightline.org/2012/06/05/china-turns-away-coal-shipments/.
Maybe we can make it into a LNG port?
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
However the future will have coal in it, IMHO!
“Novel Power Plants Could Clean Up Coal
Major engineering firms and power providers team up to demonstrate two new power generation technologies….
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428310/novel-power-plants-could-clean-up-coal/
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Every pound of coal burned now produces 2 pounds of CO2 emissions. What would the new improved plants produce?
In other news, a lot of outrage over taxpayers subsidizing the mining of coal:
Article on the issue generally: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/powder-river-basin-coal-leasing-prompts-ig-gao-reviews/2012/06/24/gJQA7xSR0V_story.html
Response by the environmental community:
http://www.usclimatenetwork.org/resource-database/joint-letter-calls-on-salazar-to-suspend-north-porcupine-auction/
There’s a lot of things that should not be subsidized by government in my opinion, like the O’s green jobs fiascos:
“The Obama administration spent $10 billion to create 355 renewable energy jobs per year, according to testimony offered Tuesday before Congress by a Congressional Research Services expert….
http://freebeacon.com/obama-administration-program-spent-10b-to-create-355-jobs-per-year/
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
TW if you are looking for 0 emissions, you’ll going to be finding yourself living in the dark and hungry for a few more years unless you like living off the grid completely.
Even our current wind or solar technologies are not without their costs to the environment.
But thru innovation and better technologies; old and even unknown energy sources will constantly be improving;i.e.
“Here’s another game-changer in the making brought to you by America’s burgeoning supplies of shale natural gas: alternative fuel vehicles and distributed power generation using fuel cells.
Emboldened by low prices and booming supplies of natural gas in the U.S , the American fuel cell industry is clawing its way back from the brink.
The industry’s leaders are gearing up to tackle one of the country’s most daunting energy challenges — and opportunities: building out a network of refueling stations that supply natural gas today — and, hopefully hydrogen tomorrow — for individual vehicles. (Hydrogen is produced from natural gas.)…
http://www.theenergyfix.com/2012/06/23/fuel-cell-backers-are-tackling-infrastructure-challenges-research-showing-potential-for-ngvs/
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
$10 bil is a bargain compared to what we’re spending now for rail infrastructure upgrades and will spend. Overpasses for at-grade crossings cost $50 mil. Apiece. And there are dozens of communities the size of Acme/Demming back to the PRB — cut in half, with emergency responders on one side and kids/schools on the other — that will have to deal with delays of 60 +/- mile-and-a-half-long coal trains or foot 95% of the bill for necessary overpasses themselves.
Gotta love how generous BNSF was in saying they MIGHT pay 5% of the cost of overpasses. I hear attendees at that Skagit meeting were dancing in the aisles.
“The Overpass Dance” will be the rage in LOTS of communities back to the PRB. But we wouldn’t want a pesky PEIS slowing down the process so we could systematically look at what the real rail impacts — and associated public costs — will be, from subsidized upgrades and expansion of infrastructure (federal/state) to quiet zones and overpasses (local).
TW where you getting $50 mil, here one that’s around 10mil:
http://www.livingstonmontana.org/living/docs/TIGER_4_Grant_Application_Final.pdf
Methinks it don’t help one’s arguments to exaggerate?
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
I like to call this “Tongue River IV” and can’t WAIT to hear the 9th Circuit’s opinion on the subject.
This new report is worth your time if your are interested about the future(past failures) of how we support our energy need:
“…The Brookings Institution, never known as a bastion of conservative thought, recently produced a report, Clean Energy: Revisiting the Challenges of Industrial Policy, that represents another blow to the President’s vision. It takes a hard look at the major reasons proponents give for subsidizing their favored energy systems. The first involves the need to remediate market failures that have not been corrected by other policies. A second set of reasons is less about correcting inefficient market outcomes than about tilting the market toward U.S. interests…
The point is also made that “ the caprice of the marketplace frustrates energy planning. So does the fact that public decisions regarding which producers to favor are all but impossible to insulate from political pressures”. One of the Brookings conclusions is that “while a case can be made that subsidizing clean energy policy might help address market failures, the case may be narrower than some assert, and turning theory into sound practice is no simple feat.”….
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2012/06/24/the-slow-sinking-of-the-obama-clean-energy-policy-2/
Yep!
Let the market decide; which in a way may be the case with GPT, because if there is or is not a market may have more to do with whether it is built than any EIS scope that can be devised.
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Oops, Afy, you may be right about the cost of at-grade crossings. More like $15 mil than 50. My bad.
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/The-wait-at-rail-crossings-may-be-worth-it-1561622.php
Still, when you count the at-grade crossings from the coast to the PRB, it adds up to real money.
Thank you to John Stark and TerryWechsler for providing informative links.
Our neighborhood is going to have a huge celebration if the river of coal collapses and GPT fails.
Be prepared to have your party crashed, Mr. NC. It’s gonna be a huge celebration without neighborhood boundaries, but if you provide the beer, we’ll be more than happy to come to you (but you better have a LOT of beer)..
Jeez! THERE WILL BE OTHER PRODUCTS MOVED THROUGH THIS TERMINAL!! Will people please quit acting like it will only be a coal terminal. It will be jobs and industry, and we need that. We can’t employ people and run our economy on rainbows and sunshine.
Please name one other PRODUCT that will be ‘moved’ through the coal terminal.
Show how your conclusion fits the published plan for the project.
Thanks.
Whatever BNSF is so generaously thinking about contributing to overpass construction pales in comparison to the fortune they spent to defeat coal slurry pipeline legislation. Had it passed, a lot of those expensive overpasses wouldn’t now be necerssary.
Maxximus: This is a coal terminal. SSA Marine has a contract to ship coal; there are no other contracts.
Turning our rail lines into a conveyor belt for coal has impacts to businesses from Montana to Cherry Point. Communities will have to pay for overpasses or they’ll see a loss of business and greater congestion from train traffic. This is why businesses, small towns and big cities are concerned about the many impacts from building North America’s largest coal terminal at Cherry Point. It will cost us.
We’re already subsidizing coal mining on public lands. We need to figure out (roughly) how much more it will cost (including economic harm) during the EIS.
Lisa’s right, Max. The new improved revised permit applications talk a lot about other commodities, but they made clear in the JARPA app filed early last year, and in the original permit applications filed with the county, they are building a coal terminal and only a coal terminal. There are pretty pictures of a second “other commodities” terminal with silos and covered storage areas, but that terminal, they said, would not be built, if at all, for at least 10 years, in “Stage 2.” Dare you to hold your breath until “Stage 2″ groundbreaking.
The arguments that favor an ‘either or’ approach don’t hold water.
SOME coal is already being shipped, and for all I know a few citizens may be using it for fuel.
Maybe they sweep up the dust along the tracks?
The question is a matter of degree.
Drunks can use bars until they reach their demonstrated limits, then they are thrown out.
The same analogy can be applied to Coal, trains, almost anything that has the capacity to impact our safety and quality of life.
GPT & BNSF clearly do not agree that reasonable limits ought to be applied to them.
Unfortunately, our current SCOTUS seems to agree with these mindless corporations.
i cannot find where i enter this sweepstakes for the trip for 2 to new zealand.
I hope NRDC and the other idiots who want to deprive the economy of all fossel fuels are proud of all the miner families they have thrown into poverty.
Scott, there are other jobs. Coal demand is dying already; GPT and other proposals simply prop up a dying industry with public dollars.
Patriot Coal declared bankruptcy this week; prices are too low for GPT to make sense unless there are incredible subsidies for mining, construction, and transshipment. Even then, with China and Peabody as major investors in a huge Mongolian coal mine and the infrastructure to connect it to China, by the time GPT were to be built if it could get approval, it’s very likely the Chinese would turn to Mongolia, and leave us in the same situation the Port of Portland found itself in in 1984–with a coal terminal and the related debt, but no customers to ship to.
Better to use those public dollars to train folks in shrinking industries for other vocations, and to move us down the line to better sources of sustainable energy.