Trump Is 'Really Interested' in Coal Payments

[highplainsdem]

Source: Bloomberg

West Virginia Governor Jim Justice said Donald Trump is “really interested” in his plan to prop up Appalachian mining by giving federal money to power plants that burn the region’s coal.

Justice, a coal and real estate mogul elected governor last year as a Democrat, announced at a West Virginia rally alongside President Trump last week that he’s becoming a Republican. Justice has recently spent a “goodly amount of time" meeting one-on-one with Trump and has liked the feedback to his pro-coal proposal. The plan calls for the Department of Homeland Security to send $15 to eastern U.S. utilities for every ton of Appalachia coal they burn.

“He’s really interested. He likes the idea,” Justice said in a phone interview on Wednesday when asked about Trump’s reaction. “Naturally, he’s trying to vet the whole process. It’s a complicated idea.”

In Justice’s eyes, the coal payments will be necessary because Trump’s moves to roll back regulations on the Appalachian coal industry won’t be enough to preserve it. The Appalachian coal sector has been shrinking for years as companies are forced to spend more money to access harder-to-reach seams of the fossil fuel. Meanwhile, competitors in regions including the Illinois Basin and Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana have much thicker coal seams that are cheaper to get to.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-09/trump-is-said-to-be-really-interested-in-coal-payments

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According to the article, this boondoggle would cost at least $1.65 billion.

[ck4829]

1. And puff goes another release of gases from the corpse of capitalism that we insist is not dead

[CurtEastPoint]

2. What an idiot loser. Supporting killer pollution. Amurka!

[Phoenix61]

3. Corporate welfare good, social welfare bad

Typical effing repubs.

[groundloop]

14. More 'trickle down' bullshit at work

Give bigly to the rich so that they can throw a few crumbs to their employees.

[Matthew28]

4. I think Trump wants to enhance global warming

and kill a lot of people. The guy enjoys causing suffering.

[lordsummerisle]

5. No, it's not from The Onion

Please explain, why the obsession with an energy source that is clearly on the way out...??

[elleng]

8. West Virginia,

5 electoral votes.

[jmowreader]

15. I'll try

Many people are worried about how they'll fit into the future. The 2016 presidential election offered two competing visions.

The Democrats wanted to prepare the workers of today for the jobs of tomorrow. Hillary and Bernie had different paths to the same end, but both wound up in the same place. (This worried me a little; the US has always been REALLY good at training too many people for too few jobs. How many people do you know who have five or six bachelor's degrees because the bottom fell out of the market they spent $50,000 preparing to enter...repeatedly? More to the point, how many people do you know with expensive degrees who are now selling cars or real estate because the bottom fell out of their chosen profession?)

The Republicans want to go back to the world the way it was before Eisenhower became president. By hook or (mostly) by crook, this is the vision that prevailed.

If Trump really wants to bring back coal, this is what I would do. It won't be cheap and it'll contain a lot of tax dollars, but here it is.

There are fifteen states, according to the Energy Information Administration, that mined at least a million short tons of coal last year. All fifteen states have universities with engineering departments. Give each of those 15 states' universities $100 million to join together in a network and invent a low-CO2-emitting process for converting coal into methane and carbon monoxide. Those two chemicals, combined with a few other elements that aren't especially hard to come up with, are the basis for most of the things you see around you. Spend another $1.5 billion constructing chemical plants to exploit our research.

[bucolic_frolic]

6. These are the free market guys using the government to intervene in the free markets

[elleng]

7. ;-(

[Leghorn21]

9. "Naturally, he's trying to vet the whole process. It's a complicated idea. - but LOSER 45 does

so well at "vetting", and he knows just how "complicated" pro-coal issues can be, yah?

This should work out splendidly!

[dalton99a]

10. Don't forget to remove all pollution controls

Just burn the whole damn state to hell

[Matthew28]

11. It maybe the only way

To wake up these dense people to reality...They'll have to suffer as China has in order for them to value regulations again.

[maxrandb]

19. Nope! Half a million WV folks had their water poisoned

For 5 months, and then still voted 65% for Retrumplicans.

Ignorance like that runs deep and hard

[dflprincess]

12. He's probably "really interested"

on how he can divert some of those payments into his own pocket.

[rpannier]

13. Curious how Rand Paul reacts

Giving government money to something like this is an anathema to him
He has already said on a few occasions that people need to move where the jobs are, not keep dying jobs on life support

As to vet the whole thing. What he's waiting on is the comic strip version

[enough]

16. K&R NT

[modrepub]

17. Coal not cost effective

WV coal plants are part of the PJM electric grid. According to PJM the break even cost for coal is ~$40 per megawatt. A combined cycle gas plant can break even at around ~$30 per megawatt. Grid typically operates in the $30-$40 range. In nearby PA lots of waste coal plants, which burn basically free coal (culm piles), are begging for more tax cuts. Again this translates to coal costing more to use.

This is a simple market fact: coal cost more to produce electricity. Back 25 years ago this was not the case. Now using coal will cost you more in your electric bill. A fact that has doomed most plants when utility boards were considering whether to raise rates to upgrade old coal plants over the years.

[NCjack]

18. Thanks for an economic summary of the coal issue. Do you know the TVA position

on coal and power plant construction?

[modrepub]

20. No I don't

Here's some more context on the cost issue

A gas fire combined cycle power plant has a 60% efficiency rating. Smaller units can reach 80% efficiency. A coal unit is about 34%. So it takes roughly twice as much coal energy to produce electricity as it does gas energy.

A combined cycle gas unit can be run with a couple dozen employees. A typical coal plant needs between 200-300 employees. For comparison TMI's one nuclear unit has over 600 employees (that's one reason why TMI is scheduled to shut down in 2019, it can no longer operate at a profit given the PJM grids average price).

It's not the regulatory environment killing coal, it's the economic environment. Funny how coal is now looking for government subsidies to stay afloat.