This comes from Public Power Daily for Today. It sort of puts things in prospective. I suspect that the older smaller units will be retired first. The newer larger ones will last longer although there are a couple of 719 MW units to be retired also. I think coal will be with us for thr foreseeable future.
Plant owners and operators expect to retire almost 27 gigawatts (GW) of capacity from 175 coal-fired generators between 2012 and 2016, the Energy Information Administration said Jul
The person that inferred that is jaded. The real cause is oversaturation of the market coupled with a warm winter that had a horrible impact on demand. Chesapeake Energy has a $3.2 billion loss for last year due to their policy of being highly aggressive in buying leases in giant land grabs and then drilling the well as a loss and not producing it due to low prices. In these hard times you can expect to see some MASSIVE sales of assets and whole companies. One that has started the whole thing off is the purchase of El Paso companies by Kinder Morgan. But due to contract obligations and monopoly conflicts Kinder Morgan will have to sell off all of the assets in Wyoming. Everyone is preapring for the worst like they did in the mid 1980s during the last recession in the industry.
We will jettison coal to our sorrow, especially when natural gas reassumes something more like its historical price.
As we were hammered over the head with during the energy problems of the 1970s, electrical production is a wasteful application of natural gas, whose efficiency there is only about 35 percent, versus virtually 100 percent in home heating.
We have a glut of natural gas now. But a lot of that production is associated with oil drilling, and if the extremists ever succeed in shutting down fracking, hang onto your keister.
China would be better advised to clean up its coal plants than to shut them down. If its plants burned as cleanly as most of our newer, bigger ones, they wouldn’t have a problem.
I am no expert (and at the risk of getting off topic) but I thought that Natural Gas Gas/Steam Turbine Combined cycle plants were more efficient than that? Is’nt the 35% efficiency rating for Thermal plants; I.E burning the NG to make Steam as can be done in many primarily coal burning plants which are equipped to use both fuels?
Your point is well taken, that it is potentially disastrous to rely too much on natural gas. Hopefully it would just be a transitional phase. There have been some anecdotal gas fracking incidents (mostly involving chemical waste mishandling), but I don’t think the extremist will ever build a scientific case against it.
It would be good of China cleaned up it’s power plant emissions for sulfides, particulates, etc., but if they don’t sequester their CO2, then they will still have a problem (science has built a case against CO2.)
The company had announced plans more than five years ago to build a coal fired plant near its Sutherland Generating Station in Marshalltown. But the coal-plant plans, on the cusp of regulatory changes to combat carbon emissions had upset environmental groups, ultimately received mixed support from state regulators.
This is a tragedy that duplicates dozens of others around the country in the past three years as utilities fold rather than fight in the face of the uncertainty of what’s coming down from the EPA. There are consequences for railroads, as Victrola points out, which to my mind makes on-topic the need to inquire more closely into the “case” against C02.
That case posits that man-made C02 is responsible for global warming. Man accounts for approximately 3 percent of C02, the rest naturally occurring. The totality of C02 makes up less than 1/2 of 1 percent – 500 parts per million – of all atmospheric gases. That C02 does not just hang around creating mischief but has a half-life of only 10 years.
Who has a political agenda – me or the scientists and politicians who would make economic policy on the basis of the “case” against C02?
DwightBranch: I can no longer find my original source, which was (yes) skeptical on manmade warming.
The site justfacts.com/globalwarming.asp corrects my “approximately 3 percent” for manmade C02 to 5 percent; it roughly agrees with the EPA on the 36-percent increase in atmospheric C02 since the start of the Industrial Revolution. (Maybe its source is the EPA?)
The ppm of C02 in the atmosphere is easy to find elsewhere, and is usually put at between 360 and 390, so I over-expressed that.
My apologies to the Forum for this stretching of the thread’s theme.
I suggest you check the meta-study paid for by the Koch’s (Big Oil rightists) in which the lead researcher, a now-former skeptic, says he was wrong, and that warming is at a crisis point and that the warming is primarily man-made.
Putting aside the O.T debates about Global Warming (which prob. will lead to the thread being locked) from what I’ve read the big issue with older coal fired power plants is the pending Mercury emissions regulations. It is very expensive to retrofit older plants to comply with these. That.combined with the previously mentioned dip in Natural Gas prices, is what driving the changes in the Industry.
My first job as a new conductor back in March 1999 was a call off the extra board to spot a coal train at the Sutherland plant. The plant is on exCGW track, reached by a “new” connection off the exCNW main east of Marshalltown. You had to run around the train and shove it into the plant. One track ends at the Iowa River, and once in a while a couple of cars would get “wet.” I never had that problem the times I spotted it, though.
Had the coal plant been built, the plan was to put in a complete loop for unloading trains. The existing plant is or has been under renovation, conversion to gas. There are hoppers still sitting on the tracks there, but I don’t think there has been a coal train spotted into it this year, certainly not in the last 6 months.
Next to the St.Croix river on the border with Wisconsin is the King power plant in Bayport Mn. It is east of St.Paul by about 15 or so miles. A few years ago they finished a one Billion dollar upgrade of the plant to make less emissions. I think that part of the upgrades were in the scrubbers. Its quite beyond me how you can spend one Billion dollars just to upgrade a power plant. Thats a huge chunk of money. BTW they get their coal delivered there by UP. I think it was up to about 1985 it was delivered there by barges coming up the St.Croix river from the Mississippi.
I used to date a girl that worked as programmer making the software and a technician that installed air quality monitoring systems in power plants. She was extremely well versed in emissions regulations, on the federal and most states levels. After all, the regs defined the parameters for the detectors. In various discussions about it, the two big ones were mercury and radiological material. Even scrubbed and bagged, there’s still more radioactive material released to the atmosphere in a day by a coal fired plant versus a nuclear plant. And a lot more captured material that is radioactive has to be dealt with (a nuclear plant’s waste material is more radioactive in total, but comprises a smaller total volume, easing handling and storage).
I could go into a whole big thing about how people go nuts over how much radiation could be released by a nuclear power plant in an accident and don’t even seem to bat an eye at how much will be released by coal. But that’s off topic.
So, in reading this thread, the overall consensus seems to be that coal is declining because of tightening regulations on emissions of nuclear fallout and mercury, the substitution of lower cost natural gas, and the warm winter.
But, the decline of coal has nothing to do with an intention of reducing CO2.
When I was a grad student in Denver I was sitting in a bar near campus when I got into a conversation about global warming with a guy who happened to be a professor at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden (that big M you can see illuminated on a hillside on Hwy 119 between Bo
A typical coal fired Steam Electric Station (industry term) can easy cost $5 to $7 billion to build. The cost depends to a large extent on the number of and size of the generating units. Accordingly, an upgrade of $1 billion, depending on the nature of the upgrades, is not unreasonable. My company has spent billions upgrading our older coal fired power plants.
The key question is whether the company can earn a return on the investment.
In Texas, where I have lived and worked for most of my life, the market determines whether the company can recover the investment. This is also true the other states that have deregulated generation. Deregulation, by the way, does not mean deregulating health and safety standards. It means deregulating the commercial terms of generating and distributing electric energy.
In those jurisdictions that have not deregulated generation, the company has to convince the regulators to allow the the cost of the upgrades to be passed through to the ratepayers. This is generally a highly political process.
Many investors have put their money into renewables which have tax incentives, and avoided coal fired power because if some uncertainties in their future.
Well, that sounds like the decline of coal does have something to do with an intention of reducing CO2 if a requirement to reduce CO2 is one of those uncertainties in the future of coal fired power.