Is Coal Golden?

Monday, Oct. 02, 2006 By CATHY BOOTH THOMAS
Heavy vehicles move coal at the Buckskin Coal Mine in Wyoming, June, 2006
ROBERT NICKELSBERG / GETTY FOR TIME
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New limits on CO2 are already springing up piecemeal outside Washington. California will require all major industries to reduce greenhouse emissions, including CO2, 25%--to 1990 levels--before 2020. Seven Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, including New York and New Jersey, have agreed to impose a cap-and-trade system on emissions, starting with the electric-power industry. Seattle; Austin, Texas; and other "Birkenstock" cities are abuzz with speculation about a carbon tax. Even on Capitol Hill there are rumblings that the days of limiting carbon emissions may be nigh. Lowe notes a sea change in four years of talking to utility companies: "I think it's almost an embarrassment to be a climate-change denier."

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With all that controversy, what's a boom-boom place like Texas supposed to do? Texas, which operates on an electric grid all its own, is just two years shy of running low on reserve power, the stuff that gets the state through energy peaks during its 100° summers. Governor Rick Perry, a Republican up for re-election in November, got a fresh lesson in the unreliability of natural gas, which provides a whopping 72% of the state's generating capacity, when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita disrupted supply lines in 2005. So late last year, after a closed-door meeting in Austin with TXU, the Governor announced that he was streamlining the permitting process for new coal plants.

Perry, who helped turn Texas into the nation's No. 1 wind-energy producer, has become coal's cheerleader in chief, defying calls to copy California on emissions. Texas already emits 10% of the nation's greenhouse gases, placing it ahead of countries like Britain or Canada in terms of output. Its power plants top the nation in toxic mercury emissions. But Perry has said, in effect, don't mess with Texas. "I, for one, don't want to tell Texans to ration air-conditioning," he wrote recently in a Dallas Morning News editorial that rejected the idea of stricter sanctions on CO2 emissions. Coal is a campaign issue, dividing Republicans in a state that is firmly red.

"Clean coal" technology certainly exists. Tampa Electric Co. in Florida has churned out electricity reliably for 10 years with a coal-to-gas system that takes out pollutants before combustion, reducing the smog factor. Ohio-based American Electric Power, the largest utility in the U.S., is working with General Electric and Bechtel to emulate Tampa and build two of the nation's first commercial-scale integrated coal gasification plants. These plants aren't free of emissions. They still spit CO2, but they can be retrofitted more cheaply to capture the carbon gas. Carbon capture and sequestration, in fact, is a hot new field. Shell Oil, as part of its foray into sequestration, feeds carbon dioxide emitted by Rotterdam's refineries into tomato and pepper-plant greenhouses.