From Stark
Portland General Electric appears to have decided it doesn’t want a coal terminal as a neighbor at the Port of St. Helens in Oregon.
Oregon’s South County Spotlight reports that the Kinder Morgan plan for a coal terminal there (link to The Chronicle of Columbia County) had relied on subleasing port-owned land from PGE, which renewed its own 99-year lease on the undeveloped site in 2008.
But a PGE spokesman told the Spotlight that company officials feared that coal dust from that operation might be harmful to operations at the company’s own generator nearby.
PGE’s decision to deny the sublease is not necessarily the end of Kinder Morgan’s coal terminal at Port of St. Helens. Port officials say they are exploring other options.
Bob Ferris alerted us to this story via Facebook.
“PGE [also] had apprehension over increased rail traffic, a concern echoed by many area residents who fear shipping coal by train through the county would split local cities in two.”
Coal is safe for people and communities,
but harmful to machines.
!!!!!!
Coal is one of the “cheapest source of energy. It is by far cheaper than nuclear, natural gas, oil. Hydro usually will be slightly cheaper. However, problems with hydro include: no new facilities because of public outcry when river valleys are dammed; and, peak demand time problems (rivers running dry in the dead of summer when peak air conditioning is needed and rivers are frozen in the dead of winter when peak heating is needed).
Coal also provides a stable source of energy (no Arab oil embargoes, no sudden scarcity like you experience with natural gas) and there is a very plentiful supply both in the U.S. and in other foreign countries.
Coal is nothing more than ancient wood which has been under pressure for millions of years. It is not sinister as you may have been led to believe.
Coal provides many jobs…”
http://www.coaleducation.org/q&a/10_reasons_why_coal.htm
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Coal is a mixture of all types of vegetative matter and the nitrogen and sulfur and heavy metals that made up the nutrients taken in by those plants.
The carbon we’re after when we burn it only makes up a part of the problem and so the simplistic nonsense from the coal education guys is just as insulting to coal proponents as it is to anyone after the honest truth.
Mercury is nothing more than a naturally occurring element in the Earth’s crust with 80 electrons per atom.
it is not as sinister as you may have been led to believe.
Eating fish provides much Mercury.
“If we can develop the technology to capture the carbon pollution released by coal, it can create jobs and provide energy well into the future,” President Obama
We must not turn our backs on a resource we have in abundance but thru innovation and technology develop paths to utilize it in a cost efficient and environmental sound way. That would be good for not only providing jobs but also providing low cost energy to consumers. The cost of energy affects the cost of every product and those who can least afford high living cost are the one’s most negatively affected.
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
It is a good time to step back and look at the opportunity costs of continuing to subsidize the obsolete coal/iron horse complex. (By the way, did you see the GE commercial selling their train engines with a BNSF logo on a computer-generated shoreline with hard-hatted models looking on? Could have been a Goldman Sachs SSA promotion. No question the lobbyists are working hard for their corporate/person masters.)
Opportunity cost one is faster progress on the turnpike to solar, wind, a smart grid, etc. When you set out to drive to Seattle, you don’t take Route 9 because it’s a resource.
Opportunity cost two is a healthy environment for children. The toxins broadcast by trains, especially trains carrying coal dust, damage the health of children.
Opportunity cost three is a quiet, orderly community, untroubled by roaring, whistle blowing, diesel spewing mile-long iron horses.
Opportunity cost four is a healthy shell fish and fishing industry, dependent on healthy marine food webs, which, we understand better today, are linked with our terrestrial environment.
Opportunity cost five is managing the risk of forcing large changes to the Earth, including ocean acidification, acceleration of the water cycle, sea level rise, severe weather, atmospheric heating, etc.
Cheap energy leads to rising prosperity and thus better medical treatment (because with prosperity you can afford to developed better medical treatments) which also leads to longer lifespans. But the greatest thing cheap energy leads to is greater personal and political freedom because of the choices we have.
Baseless scare stories aside, as a nation we should be striving thru our innovation and technology to make cheap energy cleaner with what God has given us a lot of: coal.
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
A related article in Reason today:
“…Once you decide nature is inherently healthy, moral and beautiful, the reasons to restrict human activity are endless. Every time we move or breathe, we alter the environment. Some environmentalists won’t be satisfied until our carbon footprint is reduced to zero.
Of course, that requires abolishing civilization. But if humanity’s impact on nature is an evil, abolishing us wouldn’t be so bad. The group Earth First! had the slogan, “Back to the Pleistocene!”
Most of us don’t think civilization is evil, but we worry about what environmentalists say…
Today, we put up with amazing intrusions in the name of environmentalism. A million petty regulations mandate surtaxes on gas, separation of garbage into multiple bins, special light bulbs, taxes on plastic bags and so on.
Yet these things are of so little ecological consequence that the Earth will never notice. For this, we must surrender our freedom?
http://reason.com/archives/2012/05/03/keeping-nature-exactly-as-isforever
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
AFY,
Your premise that coal is cheap and plentiful is dubious:
First, for many years, corporation managers, like the Massey Energy and Southern Company managers, have spent millions of dollars through influencing journalists like the New York Times “science” writers and politicians to exert control over the conceptual framework basic to government decisions. As a result, externalities that the iron horse/coal complex imposes on our economy are not fairly priced. You have picked up the bogus “clean coal” meme fostered by our coal-state senator turned presidential ally of GE, Berkshire Hathaway and Goldman Sachs, the three witches of our tragedy. Coal mining is not free. It requires water, another scarce finite resource in Montana and Wyoming. Coal burning continues to destroy forests through acid rain.
Second, the coal at issue for Whatcom County is on federal land. It is being sold at $1 or so per ton to global corporations that strip mine enormous holes that we can see on Google in Wyoming and Montana. The corporations plan to turn around and sell the coal that they would buy from our government for $1 at the global market price of around $20. For the people of the United States, that is not cheap: it’s a rip-off.
Third, our coal is a finite resource. There is far more coal in Wyoming and Montana than the miners can mine economically. In the 1950s, you will remember, the US government put on oil import quotas to encourage the production of domestic oil. As a result, the US reserves declined so far and fast that in 1973, there was an oil crisis with cars lined up at gas stations. If the managers have their way, that could be the future of coal.
Fourth, to focus on coal is to be enwrapped in the environment of the 19th century. It is 2012, and we know much that is new about, for example, photosynthesis, additive manufacturing, and large systems. The logic of the turnpike is that you head directly for your goals and avoid suboptimizing diversions like these attempts to revive the moribund iron horse/coal complex, which may have been the best we knew in Dickens’ foggy old London but is now a buggy whip. (If 10 years ago Massey had not bought Cheney’s connivance in fiddling a one-word change to the strip mining rules to allow mountain top removal, and the economic resources spent to pump CO2 into our atmosphere and waters over the past decade had instead been invested in technologies with benefits for our future economy, Whatcom might not be under this threat from corporate managers who would destroy our environment to make a buck.)
Sorry Bou but coal is an energy of today & the future just check out what Germany is doing and coal is a very large part of it:
“Utilities are planning to invest billions of euros in the next few years to build new power plants that would add nearly as much generation capacity as the combination of the Netherlands and Belgium had available in 2009, the German main energy lobby group BDEW said Monday.
More than EUR60 billion could be invested to the end of this decade and into the next to build new power plants with a total generation capacity of around 42 gigawatt, said the BDEW–which represents utilities that account for 90% of German electricity and gas sales.
The projects include 84 power plants with at least 20 megawatt output capacity, ranging from coal- and gas-fired plants to renewable energies such as large-scale wind farms….
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/update-utilities-plan-to-spend-eur60-billion-on-new-power-plants-in-germany-20120423-00787
“The main source of electricity still remains coal.[9] The recent plan to build 26 new coal plants …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
Working to make coal power cleaner is a goal that should be a priority with all consumers.
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
But sir, in this country they are being phased out. Even the Navajos are stepping away from coal. We are maybe smarter than the smaller european countries, who don’t have as much land and as many green options. We are only being frustrated by big coal, big oil, big investor owned power–all those who love to monopolize and keep us from a smart grid where we could make individual investments in our own power and sell the excess. Your whole attitude seems to be to stay stuck in the past, stuck with the coal barons, stuck with the oil barons, stuck in neutral.
AFY, how about a little mood music to ease the tension and wash down your links. Think of it as a metaphor.
http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/reservoirdogs/stuckinthemiddlewithyou.htm
AFY,
And how does the opportunistic, optimistic boosterism of German coal/iron horse complex managers and industry association support your dubious premise that coal is “cheap”? Investing in coal burning facilities would be a diversion from the turnpike to control of CO2 emissions, occasioned by the German reaction to Fukushima, and brought to you by the folks who once flew their air force on fuel derived from coal in an extremely costly process. Thirty years ago, you will remember, President Carter promoted the conversion of coal to gasoline; I’m sure you’ll agree that promotion does not make a process economical.
If we are to grow our economy we need to also promote cheap energy and with our technology and innovation make that cheap energy as clean as we can possibly make it!
I’s like my song better:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH5ay10RTGY
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
“Coal is a fuel for America’s future…..That’s why the U.S. power industry has invested about $90 billion since 1990 to deploy clean coal technologies to reduce air emissions – while at the same time providing affordable, reliable electricity to meet growing energy needs.
Clean coal technology is real – and it is deployed across the U.S. and around the world to the benefit of people and our planet. Congress first coined the term “clean coal technology” in the mid-1980s – long before the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) was formed. Back then, Congress defined the phrase in reference to technologies that reduced sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. Today, it obviously means a lot more.
Clean coal technology refers to technologies that improve the environmental performance of coal-based electricity plants. These technologies include devices that increase the operational efficiency of a power plant, as well as those technologies that reduce emissions. Early work to develop clean coal technologies focused on efforts to reduce traditional pollutant emissions like sulfur dioxide (SO2); nitrogen oxides (NOx), which are a precursor to smog; and particulate matter. Clean coal technology will continue to improve in response to environmental challenges…..
http://www.americaspower.org/our-commitment-clean-energy-future
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!