A new U.S. Department of Energy report says that competition from natural gas — more so than Obama administration regulations — has been the largest reason for the decline of the Appalachian coal industry, the Gazette-Mail’s Ken Ward Jr. reported last week.
“The biggest contributor to coal and nuclear plant retirements has been the advantaged economics of natural gas-fired generation,” says the 187-page report, commissioned by Energy Secretary Rick Perry in April and released last week.
Yet that’s not news to anyone in the energy industry. They knew that the new abundance of low-priced natural gas coming into the marketplace, thanks to the recently honed technique of hydraulic fracturing, would provide access to huge amounts of previously unaccessible gas.
That could encourage power companies looking at eventual replacement of aging coal-burning plants to consider new natural gas-fired plants. The natural gas plants are cheaper and quicker to build and emit fewer greenhouse gases.
The Obama administration knew about the advantages of natural gas for power plants operators too. There was little question that natural gas would gradually push out coal as the nation’s dominant producer of electric power, as it did for the first time in 2016.
Over time, market forces would take their toll on the demand for coal by power generators. A more realistic and compassionate administration would have let nature take its course and given the coal industry — and especially the many miners, operators, support industries and communities — an adequate period of time to adjust instead of rushing new regulations that would cause those aging plants to close sooner rather than a few years later.
Miners could have retrained on their own time, and communities could have either prepared for downsizing or worked to diversify their economies in a natural order.
But the Obama administration tightened the screws on the coal industry to make the transition happen sooner, with little regard for the pain and difficulty it cast on the hard-working folks that committed their lives and lifestyles to fuel the nation’s appetite for energy.
They shamed the coal industry and those who make a living off of it — and they prematurely forced the shutdown of numerous power plants and coal mines. Communities without adequate time to make the transition suffered unnecessarily.
“In the period 2011–2015, low natural gas prices proved to be a long-lasting rather than a short-term phenomenon,” the Energy Department report says.
“The compliance deadline for MATS (Mercury and Air Toxic Standards) converged with tightening pollution limits in sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxide (NOX) trading programs. Many of the coal and oil retirements in this period were plants whose owners chose to shut down a plant rather than invest in costly environmental remediation measures.”
While coal is making a slight comeback — both because of the Trump administration loosening some regulations and the price of natural gas rising — no one expects coal to be as dominant of an energy source in the future.
Whether you call it the “war on coal,” overregulation or simply market forces, last week’s Energy Department report shows how callous the Obama administration and its supporters really were to Appalachia by hastening the decline of coal use before Coal Country could reasonably adjust.
