Coal production in Appalachia emits 1 million tons a year of potent greenhouse gas. It isn't CO2.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Kenwardjr Retweeted

Coal production in Appalachia emits 1 million tons a year of this potent greenhouse gas. It isn't CO2. For
@OVReSRC
&
@wvpublic

Link to tweet

[Botany]

1. It is time to stop mining that shit.

n/t

[modrepub]

2. Coal Burning from Electric Power Plants

has decreased significantly over the last 2 decades. Natural gas now produces more and cheaper electricity than coal. There's literally thousands of megawatts of off-shore wind production planned off the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions. If these off-shore wind farms are built and can produce electricity on par with the price of their natural gas and land-based renewables counterparts then in all likelihood the last of the coal plants will be retired (too expensive to maintain and probably not needed as emergency stand-by units) in the next decade.

With the market for utility power coal nearly extinguished (think whale oil) the only real use for coal will come from the coking industry, which uses much less coal than just burning it to produce electricity. Unfortunately, emissions will continue to "leak out" from these abandon mines, but maybe at a lower rate. The area on the map is probably in a high volatile bituminous coal area. Mines in this area should be well vented to prevent gas build up and will cease once the mines shut down.

[Botany]

3. When Trump told the coal miners, their families, friends, and supporters that he was going to ...

... "bring back coal" he knew he was lying and so did > 85% of the coal people too. Natural
gas does produce greenhouse gases, fracking is hard on the environment, and many of the
natural gas producers robbed the land owners where the gas was produced of billions of $s
for "post production costs" but it is so much cheaper, cleaner, easier to use, with less waste
products, and doesn't kill people like coal does. The utility industries have spent 10s of billions
of $s flipping their plants from coal to gas and they are not going back. I am looking forward to
seeing those gas fired electric plants starting to shut down too.

Going to school in S.E. Ohio and being familiar with Appalachia and its culture coal is now
and will be seen for many years as a good thing to many of the people who live there.

[modrepub]

5. It's Also About Efficiency

A coal plant recover only about 34% of the heat to electricity. Comparable combined cycle gas plants recover 67% of the heat and convert it to electricity. Smaller combined cycle gas systems like some universities use can covert over 80% of the heat into electricity or some other use (steam from the boiler for heat or something else).

Another side benefit from using gas is that it's generally cleaner than coal (just the combustion process, extraction/development emissions are something else). So as the US has switched from coal to gas, ozone forming precursors like nitrous oxides and particulates and sulfur dioxide pollution have gone down improving air quality, pollutant fall out (sulfates and nitrate loading) and visibilities. Unfortunately, the legacy of coal extraction, including acid mine runoff and scared landscapes will probably be around for centuries.

I don't think we'll ever completely wean ourselves off of fossil fuels. A renewable system will probably need some input from gas or diesel to maintain grid stability. I'm hopeful the next few decades will be transformative on how we produce and use energy.

[VMA131Marine]

6. It's about cost

Coal generated electricity is more expensive than power generated by solar pv, wind turbines, hydroelectric, or natural gas. The cheapest form of electricity now come from wind and solar pv. The economics alone will kill what’s left of coal-fired generation in the US.

[modrepub]

7. Yup

A combined natural gas plant in rough figures is $1B and can be run by 2 dozen workers. A comparable coal plant would be about $6B to build and need hundreds of workers. A nuclear plant would cost more than $20B and employ 300+ not counting the thousands or workers to change out the fuel rods. So if you were a bank or large equity company, knowing the price of electricity from each plant would fetch the same price, which would you give the loan to?

What will be interesting to see is what the development costs will be for the new off-shore wind farms. I think they will come in at the several billion dollar range. If they become cheaper to build than combined cycle plants then that market will grind to a halt just like coal has.

[Botany]

8. I remember seeing "this thing" about gas vs coal in electric plants.

You want the water hotter? Just turn up the gas. (BTW in modern plants this is done by computers)
Want the water hotter in a coal fired plant? Have the RxR coal cars dump more coal, then feed the coal
onto a belt which feeds the burners, produce lots of nasty by-products such as acid rain, fly ash, mercury,
greenhouse gases, and it beats the hell out of the equipment and structures too.

In college we went to a metal alloy plant on the Ohio River that used coal and "the dirt" inside the plant
was amazing.

" Unfortunately, the legacy of coal extraction, including acid mine runoff and scared landscapes will probably
be around for centuries." Yes, I know it well but under Obama he (and his team) started just cleaning up the
"gob piles" from left over coal operations and some of the streams and rivers that used to run blue (free
acid) or orange from the acid mine drainage started to clean up .... no more studying the problem which
had been studied many times over .... just clean it up and use the money from the pennies on a ton of coal
extracted fee and fix the problem. Waterways that had been dirty for generations started to get better.

Trump killed those projects.

BTW on Metallurgical Coal .... to make certain metals we still need coke coal

[Mickju]

4. It's surprising that Appalachia emits more methane than the Permian Basin.