All eyes here in Va are on Congressman Rick Boucher from Va as he steps up to the chair or vice chair of the House Energy Committee. He wants to make America enery free with coal. GO RICK!
Democrats set for 2-week legislative blitz -
Edward Epstein and Zachary Coile, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
(01-03) 15:54 PST Washington -- House Democrats, preparing to elect San Francisco Rep. Nancy Pelosi as the first woman speaker in history, today laid out a plan for a two-week legislative blitz to adopt the agenda they presented to voters in the fall election campaign.
The Democrats plan to act quickly beginning with a series of ethics reforms after convening at 9 a.m. Thursday (PST) to elect the 66-year-old Pelosi to the top post and take control of the House held by Republicans the past dozen years.
"We ran on this agenda. We promised the American people we'd adopt it in the first 100 legislative hours and we will,'' Pelosi's top deputy, new Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, told reporters on Wednesday.
But Republicans complained that despite Democratic promises of greater consultation they were cut out of the drafting of the "six for '06'' legislation and won't be able to offer amendments to bills brought directly to the House floor without prior committee votes.
President Bush, faced for the first time in his presidency with a Democratic Congress, met with his Cabinet at the White House and proposed a plan to balance the federal budget within five years, eliminate most pork-barrel "earmarks'' that members insert into spending bills and called on Congress not to pass bills solely for political purposes.
Bush's ideas were met with more than a little skepticism among newly empowered Democrats in Congress because they represent policy items he has virtually ignored during his first six years in office.
Hoyer, laying out the Democratic plans, said the House is scheduled next Tuesday to enact such recommendations of the 9/11 commission as more spending on port and air cargo security, followed on Wednesday by a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 over two years.
Legislation that would allow expanded federal funding for embryonic stem cell research is scheduled for the floor a week from today, followed on Jan. 12 by a law that would allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug discounts.
Hoyer, referring to a Democratic proposal that legislation be available to House members in advance of votes, said copies of these four bills will go to the lawmakers by Friday.
The rapid pace is scheduled to continue Jan. 17 when the new Democratic majority takes up a bill that would cut interest rates on student loans. On the following day, the House plans to scrap about $20 billion in tax breaks for oil and gas companies, with the money diverted to programs to develop renewable energy.
"We want to be the do-something Congress, the do-good Congress, the do-the-American-people's-business Congress,'' said Hoyer, who added that he hopes the Senate -- which will have a razor-thin 51-49 Democratic margin -- will eventually pass the legislation.
If they keep to their ambitious schedule, the Democrats, who hold a 233-202 margin in the House, would pass their agenda before Bush delivers his State of the Union speech on Jan. 23.
Even before taking up the policy measures, the House plans to start Pelosi's historic tenure today by passing ethics reforms meant to signal a clean break with Republicans' often-controversial 12-year rule.
Pelosi plans to seize the momentum on a day that is usually ceremonial by asking the House to pass new rules banning all meals, gifts or travel paid for by lobbyists. She also plans new restrictions on lawmakers' use of corporate jets, an expensive perk abused by members of both parties.
"We will cut the link between lobbyists and legislation," Pelosi at a news conference last month. "I honestly believe that you cannot advance the people's agenda unless you drain the swamp that is Washington, D.C."
Congress also will vote on a rules package that's a clear shot at GOP leaders: It commits lawmakers to work longer; requires lawmakers be given more time to read legislation before they vote on it; ends the practice of keeping votes open for hours to twist arms and mandates that members of the minority party be allowed to participate in bipartisan conference committees.
Republicans, still adjusting to their role as the minority party, were irate Wednesday that Democrats were speeding ahead without the minority party's input.
"We are disappointed that half of the Congress is being cut out of the process,'' said Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Fla., who chairs the House Republican Conference. He and other GOP leaders accused Democrats of breaking their promise to voters to be more open and respectful of the minority party's rights in House proceedings.
Speaking of Pelosi, Rep. David Dreier, R-San Dimas (Los Angeles County) said, "I have been very reluctant to say anything critical of my fellow Californian. But when I've seen the reports that have come forward about the plans for this opening day package and the lack of consultation with the minority, I am very disappointed.''
But GOP leaders were grilled by reporters about why they hadn't given Democrats the same rights when the GOP ruled the House for 12 years. Rep. Eric Cantor, a top-ranking Republican from Virginia, admitted that Pelosi was right in 2004 when she asked GOP leaders to respect minority rights. "In hindsight, I think she was right," Cantor said.
Hoyer reiterated the Democrats' position that the bills being voted on in the next two weeks had for the most part been debated in the old session of Congress. He vowed that in the regular course of business, the minority will get more of a say.
At the White House, and in an opinion page article for the Wall Street Journal, Bush said his plan for spending restraint would lead to balancing the budget by 2012, three years after he leaves office. The plan will be formally unveiled when he offers his fiscal 2008 budget next month.
He also urged Congress to curb earmarks.
"One important message we all should take from the elections is that people want to end the secretive process by which Washington insiders are able to get billions of dollars directed to projects, many of them pork barrel projects that have never been reviewed or voted on by the Congress,'' he said.
But critics noted that in his first six years as president Bush never vetoed a spending bill, even as the number of earmarks skyrocketed from 4,126 in 1994 to 15,877 in 2005 and their value doubled to $47.4 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
Democrats plan on Friday to pass "pay-go" budget rules, which require new spending to be matched by cuts or tax increases. The package will include earmark reform aimed at making the practice more transparent.
Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., said the proof of Bush's good intentions will come in the president's proposed budget.
"His comments make us wary,'' said Spratt, who will chair the House Budget Committee. "They suggest that his budget will still embody the policies that led to the largest deficits in history."
Under Bush, the net cumulative federal budget deficit has totaled about $1.38 trillion, although it has fallen significantly this year as tax revenues ballooned.
Before the Democrats officially took power, Pelosi already was facing complaints from progressive activists that she is being too timid in refusing to cut off funding for the war in Iraq, rewrite the Patriot Act or launch impeachment proceedings against the president.
Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, and about 60 other anti-war activists interrupted a Democratic press conference Wednesday on Capitol Hill with shouts of "De-escalate! Investigate! Troops out now! The protest forced Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., and other Democrats to interrupt the media event.
"We're here to hold their feet to the fire," Sheehan said. "I think the Democratic leadership heard our message."
But Democrats say a better strategy is to begin with a series of initiatives that are popular with the public and likely to sail through Congress, which could build momentum to tackle tougher issues, such as Iraq policy, health care and tax reform.
"We've been given an opportunity here," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. "The main test that voters will look at in the next election is have we taken advantage of that opportunity? Have we followed through on the agenda for change that we laid out? Have we changed the way business is done in Washington?"
New House ethics rules
After being elected House Speaker today, Rep. Nancy Pelosi plans to ask lawmakers to vote on new ethics rules that seek to reduce the influence of lobbyists in Washington. Among the proposals:
Gift ban -- the new rules would ban members of Congress from accepting any meals and gifts paid for by lobbyists.
Travel ban -- would bar lobbyists or the organizations employing them from financing or organizing travel for lawmakers, although it would allow certain non-lobbying groups with ties to lobbyists to continue to pay for travel.
Pre-approval -- lawmakers would have to get pre-approval from the House Ethics Committee for any trips paid for by outside entities, an effort to weed out expensive junkets.
Corporate jets -- would require lawmakers to pay the full cost any time they travel on a corporate jet rather than the discounted rate members often pay.
Revolving door -- would require lawmakers to wait two years before they can lobby their former colleagues in Congress.
K Street Project -- would ban the practice started by former GOP Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas that led Republican lawmakers to pressure lobbying firms to hire Republican ex-members and top staffers.
Source: Chronicle staff report
E-mail the writers at eepstein@sfchronicle.com. and zcoile@sfchronicle.com.
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/03/BAGJ2N36GI29.DTL
©2007 San Francisco Chronicle
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Congrads to misguided Americas etc..
Congrads to the misguided kids in America who protest and want to send coal mining over seas where there are little if any regulations. Exe Dir
Coal choking Chinese cities
Michael Sheridan, Beijing
January 01, 2007
A GREAT coal rush is under way across China on a scale not seen anywhere since the 19th century. Its consequences have been detected half a world away in toxic clouds so big that they can seen from space, drifting across the Pacific to California laden with microscopic particles of chemicals that cause cancer and heart and lung diseases.
Nonetheless, the Chinese plan to build no fewer than 500 new coal-fired power stations, adding to some 2000, most of them unmodernised, that spew smoke, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere.
The political fallout of that decision is likely to challenge the foundations on which other developed nations have built their climate change policy - even as there are signs that Chinese citizens are at last rebelling against lives spent in poisonous conditions.
Cloaked in swirling mists of soot particles and smoke, cities such as China's "coal capital" of Datong are entering the coldest period of winter, in which demand for heating produces the worst pollution.
It is often darkness at noon in Datong, just 260km west of Beijing, where vehicles drive in daytime with their headlights on.
One of the four filthiest towns in China, it stands at the heart of the nation's coal belt in Shanxi province, a region that mines more coal every year than Britain, Russia and Germany combined.
Cancer rates are soaring, child health is a time bomb and the people are paying the price for China's breakneck rush to riches and industrialisation - an estimated 400,000 premature deaths nationwide because of pollution every year.
For the first time, the Chinese media have reported a revolt among the choking citizens of Shanxi. More than 90 per cent of people surveyed by the provincial bureau for environmental protection said economic growth can not go on at such an appalling cost.
That puts them on a collision course with their rulers - the same survey, reported by the China Youth Daily, found that 90 per cent of mayors and local cadres opposed any moves to protect the environment that might slow the economy.
It is not hard to find the reason why. One mine boss in Shanxi named Zhang owns three Rolls-Royces of different colours plus a fleet of other luxury cars for his extended family.
Coal is king in China. The nation's hunger for energy appears insatiable. Oil is too expensive. Nuclear power is a distant option.
So China is digging furiously and fast in more than 21,000 mines. Coal output has doubled in the past five years. The nation will use 2.5 billion tonnes in 2007.
"If we don't protect our environment, our economic miracle will soon come to an end," said Pan Yue, the outspoken head of the Government's state environmental protection bureau.
"Acid rain falls on one third of China's land, most of our biggest seven rivers are poisoned, a quarter of our people have no clean drinking water and a third of them breathe polluted air," he said. China is not bound by the Kyoto protocol, the international agreement to limit emissions of climate-changing gases.
Now Britain and other signatories to the controversial Kyoto accords face the prospect that they may in effect be made redundant by Chinese growth - plus the fact that the US, the world's biggest polluter, has refused to sign.
Beijing has proved unable to compel local leaders to spend money on filters that could cut sulphur emissions from smoke stacks by 95 per cent. Nor will they buy new Western technology for power stations, which could operate more cleanly.
A clean future seems a distant dream - and the Rolls-Royces have to be washed every day.
The Sunday Times
Coal choking Chinese cities
Michael Sheridan, Beijing
January 01, 2007
A GREAT coal rush is under way across China on a scale not seen anywhere since the 19th century. Its consequences have been detected half a world away in toxic clouds so big that they can seen from space, drifting across the Pacific to California laden with microscopic particles of chemicals that cause cancer and heart and lung diseases.
Nonetheless, the Chinese plan to build no fewer than 500 new coal-fired power stations, adding to some 2000, most of them unmodernised, that spew smoke, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere.
The political fallout of that decision is likely to challenge the foundations on which other developed nations have built their climate change policy - even as there are signs that Chinese citizens are at last rebelling against lives spent in poisonous conditions.
Cloaked in swirling mists of soot particles and smoke, cities such as China's "coal capital" of Datong are entering the coldest period of winter, in which demand for heating produces the worst pollution.
It is often darkness at noon in Datong, just 260km west of Beijing, where vehicles drive in daytime with their headlights on.
One of the four filthiest towns in China, it stands at the heart of the nation's coal belt in Shanxi province, a region that mines more coal every year than Britain, Russia and Germany combined.
Cancer rates are soaring, child health is a time bomb and the people are paying the price for China's breakneck rush to riches and industrialisation - an estimated 400,000 premature deaths nationwide because of pollution every year.
For the first time, the Chinese media have reported a revolt among the choking citizens of Shanxi. More than 90 per cent of people surveyed by the provincial bureau for environmental protection said economic growth can not go on at such an appalling cost.
That puts them on a collision course with their rulers - the same survey, reported by the China Youth Daily, found that 90 per cent of mayors and local cadres opposed any moves to protect the environment that might slow the economy.
It is not hard to find the reason why. One mine boss in Shanxi named Zhang owns three Rolls-Royces of different colours plus a fleet of other luxury cars for his extended family.
Coal is king in China. The nation's hunger for energy appears insatiable. Oil is too expensive. Nuclear power is a distant option.
So China is digging furiously and fast in more than 21,000 mines. Coal output has doubled in the past five years. The nation will use 2.5 billion tonnes in 2007.
"If we don't protect our environment, our economic miracle will soon come to an end," said Pan Yue, the outspoken head of the Government's state environmental protection bureau.
"Acid rain falls on one third of China's land, most of our biggest seven rivers are poisoned, a quarter of our people have no clean drinking water and a third of them breathe polluted air," he said. China is not bound by the Kyoto protocol, the international agreement to limit emissions of climate-changing gases.
Now Britain and other signatories to the controversial Kyoto accords face the prospect that they may in effect be made redundant by Chinese growth - plus the fact that the US, the world's biggest polluter, has refused to sign.
Beijing has proved unable to compel local leaders to spend money on filters that could cut sulphur emissions from smoke stacks by 95 per cent. Nor will they buy new Western technology for power stations, which could operate more cleanly.
A clean future seems a distant dream - and the Rolls-Royces have to be washed every day.
The Sunday Times
China pollution headed to California due to mis-guided eco nuts
Shifting the shaft is what the so called environmentalist here in the U.S. are doing. They protest and shut down coal mining and manufacturing here in America where there are over "105 Gov organizations out there making regulating the industry using modern science to make sure its done to the highest standards. Yeh they are really making a difference!!!! These people have created the economic machine China is today with there mis-guided views on issues here in America concerning energy and manufacturing. Thanks out there California for making the U.S.A. a second rate nation when held up to these undeveloped nations who will meet the demand for these products. What goes around comes around and the result of the manufacturing of the products you demand but are ignorant as to the reality that creates these products. Exe Dir VMA
This is irony school kids; that the pollution is coming back on the land of fruits and nuts.
China rush to coal for power causes huge pollution: UK Times
By Robert Daniel
Last Update: 4:38 AM ET Dec 31, 2006
TEL AVIV (MarketWatch) -- China's rush to coal as an energy source has created huge toxic clouds, some of which -- carrying microscopic particles of poisonous chemicals -- have drifted across the Pacific to California, the Sunday Times of London reported. The Chinese have 2,000 coal-fired power stations in operation, most of them with older technology, and they plan to build at least 500 more plants, the paper reported. China's cancer rates are soaring and an estimated 400,000 people die prematurely from pollution each year, the paper reported.
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Copyright © 2007 MarketWatch, Inc. All rights reserved.
By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy (updated 4/3/03).
This is irony school kids; that the pollution is coming back on the land of fruits and nuts.
China rush to coal for power causes huge pollution: UK Times
By Robert Daniel
Last Update: 4:38 AM ET Dec 31, 2006
TEL AVIV (MarketWatch) -- China's rush to coal as an energy source has created huge toxic clouds, some of which -- carrying microscopic particles of poisonous chemicals -- have drifted across the Pacific to California, the Sunday Times of London reported. The Chinese have 2,000 coal-fired power stations in operation, most of them with older technology, and they plan to build at least 500 more plants, the paper reported. China's cancer rates are soaring and an estimated 400,000 people die prematurely from pollution each year, the paper reported.
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Copyright © 2007 MarketWatch, Inc. All rights reserved.
By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy (updated 4/3/03).
Saturday, December 30, 2006
China will no longer set coal prices Mkt takes over with macro-control
China to reform coal price system
Source: CCTV.com
12-28-2006 10:38
The National Development and Reform Commission is reforming the country's coal pricing system, to allow the market to determine the prices.
The NDRC set the goal of next year's cross-provincial coal transportation volume at 738 million tons, with over 530 million tons for power generation. Its priority will be given to companies that measure up to certain criteria such as energy saving and environmental protection.
The government will no longer fix the coal prices. The coal and power companies may have more influence in terms of price-setting.
Ou Xinqian, vice minister of NDRC said: "We have changed the 50-year old system of government-set prices. Now the prices will be negotiated between miners and buyers under the state's macro-control."
Experts say because of the short supply and huge demand, coal prices may rise under the market-oriented price system.
Pu Hongjiu, deputy director of China National Coal Association said: "The charges for railway and shipping transportation are increasing, this will certainly influence the coal prices."
According to estimates, additional costs such as resources and environment cost will make increase the cost of coal by 70 to 80 yuan per ton.
var para_count=1
Editor:Li Yang
Related stories:
China to see 2.5-bln-ton coal demand in 2007(2006/12/28/ 08:17)
Source: CCTV.com
12-28-2006 10:38
The National Development and Reform Commission is reforming the country's coal pricing system, to allow the market to determine the prices.
The NDRC set the goal of next year's cross-provincial coal transportation volume at 738 million tons, with over 530 million tons for power generation. Its priority will be given to companies that measure up to certain criteria such as energy saving and environmental protection.
The government will no longer fix the coal prices. The coal and power companies may have more influence in terms of price-setting.
Ou Xinqian, vice minister of NDRC said: "We have changed the 50-year old system of government-set prices. Now the prices will be negotiated between miners and buyers under the state's macro-control."
Experts say because of the short supply and huge demand, coal prices may rise under the market-oriented price system.
Pu Hongjiu, deputy director of China National Coal Association said: "The charges for railway and shipping transportation are increasing, this will certainly influence the coal prices."
According to estimates, additional costs such as resources and environment cost will make increase the cost of coal by 70 to 80 yuan per ton.
var para_count=1
Editor:Li Yang
Related stories:
China to see 2.5-bln-ton coal demand in 2007(2006/12/28/ 08:17)
Pakistan imports coal looking for better quality
International ; The News
Cement industry uses 1.35m tonnes of imported coal
Editor-in-Chief: Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman
KARACHI: The cement industry is likely to have consumed 1.35 million tonnes of coal in the first half of the current financial year, a leading importer of coal told The News. Najeeb Balagamwala said the import of coal for cement-producing units has risen sharply this year following massive capacity expansion undertaken by the industry. If the coal import keeps its pace, it should reach 2.7 million tonnes by the end of current fiscal. In the whole financial year 2005-06, the industry had used 2.22 million tonnes of coal. Import of coal into the country had started rising a few years ago because of growing demand by the cement industry since it switched its plants from fuel oil to coal to reduce cost of production.Meanwhile, a coal washing plant has recently been set up at Dhabeji at a cost of Rs50 million with a capacity of purifying 2,000 tonnes per day. Local coal and imported coal of cheap quality will be washed in this plant. The plant has been imported from the UK. Besides, three more plants are in the process of installation at Lakhra. The increasing dependence of cement plants on imported coal had necessitated the establishment of coal washing plants to produce coal of specific standard meeting the requirements of cement plants. The coal washing plant would provide coal with fewer impurities, reducing the production cost of cement industry. Cement makers have to use expensive imported coal because the locally available coal does not meet their requirement.The local coal lacks the capability of producing required level of heat and has higher level of sulphur contents as compared to the imported coal. Coal is the cheapest source of thermal energy used in industrial sector. It has the potential to replace other expensive fuels such as furnace oil. Cement industry was the first sector to switch over from oil to coal. Pakistan imports coal mainly from Indonesia, South Africa and China. It has also imported coal from Australia and Russia, but only in little quantities. Pakistan has coal reserves of around 178 billion tonnes. The coal reserves in Thar are estimated at 175 billion tonnes. Pakistan produces 3.2 million tonnes of coal every year, but mostly it is of inferior quality. Miners have to go 500-1000 ft deep, which increases cost of production. The cost also rises because of manual labour, which is usually short of demand. The local coalmines are not mechanised. There are three countries in the world having reserves sufficient for next 250 years. These are Pakistan, India and China. The coal Pakistan produces has high sulphur and moisture content making it feasible for power plants, but not cement factories. Besides, local suppliers of coal are unreliable for the cement makers. They usually fail to deliver coal within the agreed time. Since cement-makers are pursuing capacity expansion, the consumption of coal in cement plants is likely to rise to 4.5 million tonnes in 2008.
Cement industry uses 1.35m tonnes of imported coal
Editor-in-Chief: Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman
KARACHI: The cement industry is likely to have consumed 1.35 million tonnes of coal in the first half of the current financial year, a leading importer of coal told The News. Najeeb Balagamwala said the import of coal for cement-producing units has risen sharply this year following massive capacity expansion undertaken by the industry. If the coal import keeps its pace, it should reach 2.7 million tonnes by the end of current fiscal. In the whole financial year 2005-06, the industry had used 2.22 million tonnes of coal. Import of coal into the country had started rising a few years ago because of growing demand by the cement industry since it switched its plants from fuel oil to coal to reduce cost of production.Meanwhile, a coal washing plant has recently been set up at Dhabeji at a cost of Rs50 million with a capacity of purifying 2,000 tonnes per day. Local coal and imported coal of cheap quality will be washed in this plant. The plant has been imported from the UK. Besides, three more plants are in the process of installation at Lakhra. The increasing dependence of cement plants on imported coal had necessitated the establishment of coal washing plants to produce coal of specific standard meeting the requirements of cement plants. The coal washing plant would provide coal with fewer impurities, reducing the production cost of cement industry. Cement makers have to use expensive imported coal because the locally available coal does not meet their requirement.The local coal lacks the capability of producing required level of heat and has higher level of sulphur contents as compared to the imported coal. Coal is the cheapest source of thermal energy used in industrial sector. It has the potential to replace other expensive fuels such as furnace oil. Cement industry was the first sector to switch over from oil to coal. Pakistan imports coal mainly from Indonesia, South Africa and China. It has also imported coal from Australia and Russia, but only in little quantities. Pakistan has coal reserves of around 178 billion tonnes. The coal reserves in Thar are estimated at 175 billion tonnes. Pakistan produces 3.2 million tonnes of coal every year, but mostly it is of inferior quality. Miners have to go 500-1000 ft deep, which increases cost of production. The cost also rises because of manual labour, which is usually short of demand. The local coalmines are not mechanised. There are three countries in the world having reserves sufficient for next 250 years. These are Pakistan, India and China. The coal Pakistan produces has high sulphur and moisture content making it feasible for power plants, but not cement factories. Besides, local suppliers of coal are unreliable for the cement makers. They usually fail to deliver coal within the agreed time. Since cement-makers are pursuing capacity expansion, the consumption of coal in cement plants is likely to rise to 4.5 million tonnes in 2008.
Sierra Club takes legal action to stop TX power plants
Legal action filed to halt coal plants
Waxahachie Daily Light;
From STAFF REPORTS
The Sierra Club, represented by the Austin office of Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), took legal action Wednesday to stop the “unprecedented, unreasonable, and illegal” plan by Governor Rick Perry to “fast track” administrative hearings for the construction of up to 18 coal-fired power plants in the state.Most of the plants in question are being proposed by Dallas-based TXU.EIP Austin Office Counsel Ilan Levin filed the petition on behalf of the Sierra Club to intervene in a state district lawsuit originally brought by Environmental Defense over the processing of coal plant permits.Wednesday’s legal action by Sierra Club stems from a recent state agency decision to consolidate six proposed TXU coal plant permits into one hearing and to set those permits for a speedy decision.The lawsuit seeks to halt Perry’s executive order of Oct. 27, 2005, directing the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to accelerate consideration of permit applications and the Texas State Office of Administrative Hearings (SOAH) to issue decisions on air pollution permits for new electric power plants.According to a press release from the governor’s office on Oct. 27, 2005, the executive order was put in place to help cut the increasing costs of electric power. The order also called for a public information campaign regarding deregulation.
“This executive order will help empower Texas ratepayers to find the best price available to power their homes and businesses,” Perry said. “With energy demands continuing to rise in the state and the sharp increase in the costs of natural gas in recent years, it is imperative that consumers not only have choices in the marketplace, but that the state undertake conservation measures. And ultimately, in order to keep prices low, we must diversify energy sources for the generation of power.”Perry added that the state should develop wind energy sources and clean coal technologies to reduce the state’s dependence on natural gas for producing electricity.“There is no reason it should take more than six months for a state agency to resolve a permitting dispute concerning an electric generation facility,” Perry said. “This executive order reduces red tape, increases conservation, and empowers consumers as they choose their electric provider. It’s the right approach to rising prices.”
According to Perry, the directive to SOAH would cut in half, from one year to six months, the amount of time it takes the state to resolved contested applications for electric generating permits.Perry’s office could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.“Today, the Sierra Club is asking a judge to overturn a governor’s executive order that imposes unfair burdens on regular people simply trying to avail themselves of the common-sense environmental protections built into state and federal laws,” EIP Counsel Ilan Levin said. “We’re saying that speeding up the required decision process for major new sources of smog and other air pollution is illegal and unfair, especially to citizens trying to participate.”Rita Beving, Conservation Co-Chair for the Dallas Sierra Club Group, said the legal action is a critical step in “the fight by Texas citizens to assert their rights to protect their health and environment.”“The tragedy is that we could meet our energy needs through greater efficiency and renewable energy, without subjecting our cities to further air pollution from coal plants,” Beving said.The Sierra Club maintains that the Perry’s fast-tracking scheme has huge consequences. “To put the magnitude of the six TXU permits in context, it is worth noting the additional greenhouse gases associated with these new coal plants,” a spokesman for the Sierra Club said. “While not addressed in the permits, the new units will emit an additional estimated 51 million tons of carbon dioxide per year into Texas skies. In 2005, all existing Texas power plants emitted 255.4 million tons of carbon dioxide.”
With the lawsuit, the Sierra Club contends that a full and deliberate hearing process on each of the power plant applications is crucial due to “the serious health and environmental consequences associated with coal-fired power plants, such as increased sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury pollution.”According to the lawsuit, “Sulfur dioxide interacts with nitrogen oxides to form nitric and sulfuric acids, commonly known as acid rain, which damages forests and acidifies soil and waterways. Harvard School of Public Health studies have shown that SO2 emissions from power plants significantly harm the cardiovascular and respiratory health of people who live near the plants. According to U.S. EPA studies, fine particle pollution from power plants causes more than 20,000 premature deaths a year.”The lawsuit also contends that the plants emit harmful mercury and nitrogen oxide pollutants.
“The executive order imposes an unreasonable schedule to thoroughly develop the required technical and legal issues for one major air permit of the type being considered, let alone six of them,” the lawsuit reads. “The governor’s executive order RP 49 infringes on the rights of Texas citizens to participate meaningfully in the environmental permitting arena. The right of any affected party to participate in agency permitting decisions is rooted in the constitutional right to due process. The governor lacks authority to unilaterally alter this system. Further, the governor lacks the authority to dictate to an administrative law judge exactly how much time is allowed for a judicial administrative decision, and to do so violates the doctrine of separation of powers.”Early last month, a “rolling editorial cartoon” of Perry, which depicted him kissing a large industrial smoke stack as smoke billows out from a smaller industrial plant made it’s appearance in downtown Waxahachie as part of a seven-day trip through Central Texas.The float was built by Midlothian’s Downwinders At Risk “to bring attention to Perry’s inaction” over pollution from industrial plants.“We’ve been working on raising awareness of the pollution from the cement kilns and coal plants around the state,” Downwinders board member Jim Schermbeck said. “The governor’s own environmental agency produced a report saying the plants can economically cut their emissions by 80 to 90 percent. Yet Perry refuses to require the filters necessary.”According to Schermbeck, the latest draft in the clean air plan for the North Texas area only requires a 40 percent reduction in air pollution from the area’s cement kilns.“We’re not making requirements of industrial polluters,” Schermbeck said. “But at the same time we’re expecting personal vehicles to meet higher standards. These guys have been polluting the air for over 16 years without a catalytic converter installed. The new technology is not included in any of the state’s current clean air plans.”
Schermbeck said Downwinders At Risk is not hoping to close the cement kilns down, but as neighbors of the plants, the group wants Perry to require new pollution controls to be installed in each kiln.
Waxahachie Daily Light;
From STAFF REPORTS
The Sierra Club, represented by the Austin office of Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), took legal action Wednesday to stop the “unprecedented, unreasonable, and illegal” plan by Governor Rick Perry to “fast track” administrative hearings for the construction of up to 18 coal-fired power plants in the state.Most of the plants in question are being proposed by Dallas-based TXU.EIP Austin Office Counsel Ilan Levin filed the petition on behalf of the Sierra Club to intervene in a state district lawsuit originally brought by Environmental Defense over the processing of coal plant permits.Wednesday’s legal action by Sierra Club stems from a recent state agency decision to consolidate six proposed TXU coal plant permits into one hearing and to set those permits for a speedy decision.The lawsuit seeks to halt Perry’s executive order of Oct. 27, 2005, directing the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to accelerate consideration of permit applications and the Texas State Office of Administrative Hearings (SOAH) to issue decisions on air pollution permits for new electric power plants.According to a press release from the governor’s office on Oct. 27, 2005, the executive order was put in place to help cut the increasing costs of electric power. The order also called for a public information campaign regarding deregulation.
“This executive order will help empower Texas ratepayers to find the best price available to power their homes and businesses,” Perry said. “With energy demands continuing to rise in the state and the sharp increase in the costs of natural gas in recent years, it is imperative that consumers not only have choices in the marketplace, but that the state undertake conservation measures. And ultimately, in order to keep prices low, we must diversify energy sources for the generation of power.”Perry added that the state should develop wind energy sources and clean coal technologies to reduce the state’s dependence on natural gas for producing electricity.“There is no reason it should take more than six months for a state agency to resolve a permitting dispute concerning an electric generation facility,” Perry said. “This executive order reduces red tape, increases conservation, and empowers consumers as they choose their electric provider. It’s the right approach to rising prices.”
According to Perry, the directive to SOAH would cut in half, from one year to six months, the amount of time it takes the state to resolved contested applications for electric generating permits.Perry’s office could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.“Today, the Sierra Club is asking a judge to overturn a governor’s executive order that imposes unfair burdens on regular people simply trying to avail themselves of the common-sense environmental protections built into state and federal laws,” EIP Counsel Ilan Levin said. “We’re saying that speeding up the required decision process for major new sources of smog and other air pollution is illegal and unfair, especially to citizens trying to participate.”Rita Beving, Conservation Co-Chair for the Dallas Sierra Club Group, said the legal action is a critical step in “the fight by Texas citizens to assert their rights to protect their health and environment.”“The tragedy is that we could meet our energy needs through greater efficiency and renewable energy, without subjecting our cities to further air pollution from coal plants,” Beving said.The Sierra Club maintains that the Perry’s fast-tracking scheme has huge consequences. “To put the magnitude of the six TXU permits in context, it is worth noting the additional greenhouse gases associated with these new coal plants,” a spokesman for the Sierra Club said. “While not addressed in the permits, the new units will emit an additional estimated 51 million tons of carbon dioxide per year into Texas skies. In 2005, all existing Texas power plants emitted 255.4 million tons of carbon dioxide.”
With the lawsuit, the Sierra Club contends that a full and deliberate hearing process on each of the power plant applications is crucial due to “the serious health and environmental consequences associated with coal-fired power plants, such as increased sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury pollution.”According to the lawsuit, “Sulfur dioxide interacts with nitrogen oxides to form nitric and sulfuric acids, commonly known as acid rain, which damages forests and acidifies soil and waterways. Harvard School of Public Health studies have shown that SO2 emissions from power plants significantly harm the cardiovascular and respiratory health of people who live near the plants. According to U.S. EPA studies, fine particle pollution from power plants causes more than 20,000 premature deaths a year.”The lawsuit also contends that the plants emit harmful mercury and nitrogen oxide pollutants.
“The executive order imposes an unreasonable schedule to thoroughly develop the required technical and legal issues for one major air permit of the type being considered, let alone six of them,” the lawsuit reads. “The governor’s executive order RP 49 infringes on the rights of Texas citizens to participate meaningfully in the environmental permitting arena. The right of any affected party to participate in agency permitting decisions is rooted in the constitutional right to due process. The governor lacks authority to unilaterally alter this system. Further, the governor lacks the authority to dictate to an administrative law judge exactly how much time is allowed for a judicial administrative decision, and to do so violates the doctrine of separation of powers.”Early last month, a “rolling editorial cartoon” of Perry, which depicted him kissing a large industrial smoke stack as smoke billows out from a smaller industrial plant made it’s appearance in downtown Waxahachie as part of a seven-day trip through Central Texas.The float was built by Midlothian’s Downwinders At Risk “to bring attention to Perry’s inaction” over pollution from industrial plants.“We’ve been working on raising awareness of the pollution from the cement kilns and coal plants around the state,” Downwinders board member Jim Schermbeck said. “The governor’s own environmental agency produced a report saying the plants can economically cut their emissions by 80 to 90 percent. Yet Perry refuses to require the filters necessary.”According to Schermbeck, the latest draft in the clean air plan for the North Texas area only requires a 40 percent reduction in air pollution from the area’s cement kilns.“We’re not making requirements of industrial polluters,” Schermbeck said. “But at the same time we’re expecting personal vehicles to meet higher standards. These guys have been polluting the air for over 16 years without a catalytic converter installed. The new technology is not included in any of the state’s current clean air plans.”
Schermbeck said Downwinders At Risk is not hoping to close the cement kilns down, but as neighbors of the plants, the group wants Perry to require new pollution controls to be installed in each kiln.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
More debate- electricity demand to increase! How will we meet it?
Op-Ed: Emissions concerns heightened by record use of coalBy staff
Wednesday, December 27, 2006 - Bangor Daily News
The effort to reduce our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions has inevitably lost the attention of the public, and of distracted Washington officials, during the Iraqi crisis. But the problem remains, and current developments are making it even more urgent to find a solution.
Our nation’s coal plants alone are responsible for about 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Anyone who is aware of the record amount of coal being burned to produce more than 50 percent of the electricity used in the United States — well over 1 billion tons a year — should not be surprised by the harm it’s doing to the environment. The fundamental coal problem is that no proven technology exists to remove or capture carbon dioxide at coal plants, or to sequester the greenhouse gases underground.
But what may astonish even the most jaded critics of the fossil-fuel industry is that more than 150 new coal plants — almost all of them old-fashioned, pulverized coal-burning units — are planned or under construction in the United States, despite growing public concern about climate change. When they go into operation they will increase the amount of power generated by coal in the United States by some 50 percent — and increase the greenhouse gases that coal plants generate by almost as much.
Many of the new coal plants will provide new capacity to meet our increasing demand for electricity. But some of them will displace existing plants that are fueled by natural gas — plants that emit only about half as much carbon as coal. So our main electric power generation trend is actually leading to an increase in greenhouse gases, not a reduction.
As for clean-coal technology, it is still a hope for the future. The most promising technology, integrated gasification combined cycle, or IGCC, reduces sulfur dioxide, mercury and particulate emissions but not carbon dioxide, and it performs well only with certain types of coal. Neither the technology nor its economics has been proven. Little wonder there are only two IGCC plants in operation in the United States.
The great challenge we face in the electric power sector is to rein in the amount of new generation that is fueled by traditional coal technologies, releasing their great quantities of greenhouse gases, and replace as much of it as possible with emissions-free power sources. And the greatest opportunity for that substitution lies in nuclear electric power.
Nuclear power plants — unlike coal, gas, oil, even burning wood, waste and biofuels — emit no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. That alone is reason to build more of them to help meet the nation’s electricity needs. Currently 33 new nuclear plants are being planned, but unfortunately those additions won’t be enough to maintain nuclear power’s current share of electricity generation, let alone reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The Energy Information Administration recently forecast that by 2030 nuclear power’s share will decline from 20 percent today to 15 percent. Meanwhile, coal’s share of electricity production is projected to climb to 55 percent.
Until EPA or Congress deals directly with the carbon problem, it is likely that scores of coal plants will be built that we’ll all live to regret. The challenge will be to expand the use of nuclear power. It’s estimated that twice as many nuclear plants as now planned — about 60 — will need to be built over the next two decades in order to reduce greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels. It is well worth the effort if we want to prevent dangerous changes in our climate.
Donald A. Grant. Ph.D., P.E., is the R.C. Hill Professor and chairman in the mechanical engineering department at the University of Maine.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006 - Bangor Daily News
The effort to reduce our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions has inevitably lost the attention of the public, and of distracted Washington officials, during the Iraqi crisis. But the problem remains, and current developments are making it even more urgent to find a solution.
Our nation’s coal plants alone are responsible for about 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Anyone who is aware of the record amount of coal being burned to produce more than 50 percent of the electricity used in the United States — well over 1 billion tons a year — should not be surprised by the harm it’s doing to the environment. The fundamental coal problem is that no proven technology exists to remove or capture carbon dioxide at coal plants, or to sequester the greenhouse gases underground.
But what may astonish even the most jaded critics of the fossil-fuel industry is that more than 150 new coal plants — almost all of them old-fashioned, pulverized coal-burning units — are planned or under construction in the United States, despite growing public concern about climate change. When they go into operation they will increase the amount of power generated by coal in the United States by some 50 percent — and increase the greenhouse gases that coal plants generate by almost as much.
Many of the new coal plants will provide new capacity to meet our increasing demand for electricity. But some of them will displace existing plants that are fueled by natural gas — plants that emit only about half as much carbon as coal. So our main electric power generation trend is actually leading to an increase in greenhouse gases, not a reduction.
As for clean-coal technology, it is still a hope for the future. The most promising technology, integrated gasification combined cycle, or IGCC, reduces sulfur dioxide, mercury and particulate emissions but not carbon dioxide, and it performs well only with certain types of coal. Neither the technology nor its economics has been proven. Little wonder there are only two IGCC plants in operation in the United States.
The great challenge we face in the electric power sector is to rein in the amount of new generation that is fueled by traditional coal technologies, releasing their great quantities of greenhouse gases, and replace as much of it as possible with emissions-free power sources. And the greatest opportunity for that substitution lies in nuclear electric power.
Nuclear power plants — unlike coal, gas, oil, even burning wood, waste and biofuels — emit no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. That alone is reason to build more of them to help meet the nation’s electricity needs. Currently 33 new nuclear plants are being planned, but unfortunately those additions won’t be enough to maintain nuclear power’s current share of electricity generation, let alone reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The Energy Information Administration recently forecast that by 2030 nuclear power’s share will decline from 20 percent today to 15 percent. Meanwhile, coal’s share of electricity production is projected to climb to 55 percent.
Until EPA or Congress deals directly with the carbon problem, it is likely that scores of coal plants will be built that we’ll all live to regret. The challenge will be to expand the use of nuclear power. It’s estimated that twice as many nuclear plants as now planned — about 60 — will need to be built over the next two decades in order to reduce greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels. It is well worth the effort if we want to prevent dangerous changes in our climate.
Donald A. Grant. Ph.D., P.E., is the R.C. Hill Professor and chairman in the mechanical engineering department at the University of Maine.
Coal Into Jet Fuel at $40 but China can make it for $25 per barrel
How coal may soon be keeping jets in air
Dec 26 2006
Birimingham Post; Business Section
STEVE JAMES looks at how the United States is hoping to turn coal into aircraft fuel.
When railways ruled, it was the sweating firemen shovelling coal into the furnace who kept the engines running.
Now, nearly two centuries after Stephenson's "Rocket" steam locomotive helped usher in the Industrial Revolution, that same coal could be the fuel that keeps the jet age aloft.
But with a twist: The planes of the future could be flown with liquid fuel made from coal or natural gas.
Already the United States Air Force has carried out tests flying a B-52 Stratofor-tress with a coal-based fuel.
And JetBlue Airways is supporting a bill in the US Congress that would extend tax credits for alternative fuels, pushing technology to produce jet fuel for the equivalent of $40 (£20.50) a barrel - way below current oil prices.
Major coal mining companies in the United States, which has more coal reserves than Saudi Arabia has oil, are investing in ways to develop fuels derived from carbon.
The technology of producing a liquid fuel from coal or natural gas is hardly new.
The Fischer-Tropsch process was developed by German researchers Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch in 1923 and used by Germany and Japan during World War II to produce alternative fuels.
Indeed, in 1944, Germany produced 6.5 million tons, or 124,000 barrels a day.
And coal-to-liquid (CTL) fuel is already in use elsewhere, like South Africa, where it meets 30 per cent of transportation fuel needs.
In addition to being cheaper than oil, advocates point out that the fuel is environmentally friendlier and would also help America and much of the Western world wean itself off foreign oil imports.
"America must reduce its dependence on foreign oil via environmentally sound and proven coal-to-liquid technologies," said JetBlue's founder and chief executive, David Neeleman.
"Utilizing our domestic coal reserves is the right way to achieve energy independence."
In a recent briefing to power and energy executives, Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, said bio-diesel fuels offered little in the way of reduced carbon dioxide emissions, have enormous production costs and present "serious transmission and infrastructure" problems.
In contrast, CTL transportation fuels are substantially cleaner-burning than conventional fuels.
Mr Popovich warned that the United States risked falling behind economic competitors such as China, which plans to spend £13 billion on CTL plants.
America is "already behind the curve" when it comes to tapping the vast liquid fuel potential that coal offers, said John Ward, of natural resources company Headwaters, which builds CTL plants.
He said plants in America would likely each produce 40,000 barrels of CTL fuel per day, with a typical plant using 8.5 million tons of coal per year.
In contrast, China is focused on building plants capable of producing 60,000 barrels of CTL fuel per day, he said.
In October, Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer and a consortium of energy and technology companies announced the state will be home to one of America's first CTL energy plants.
The $1 billion Bull Mountain plant is set to produce 22,000 barrels per day of diesel fuel and 300 megawatts of electricity - enough to power 240,000 homes - in six years.
Mr Schweitzer and the companies behind the plant, including Arch Coal and DKRW Advanced Fuels, say the production of fuel and electricity will not release the greenhouse gases associated with coal-generated electricity.
Arch has a 25 per cent stake in DKRW and the companies are also developing a CTL plant in Medicine Bow, Wyoming.
At a recent coal industry conference, the heads of two of America's Big Four producers talked up CTL development.
Arch Coal chairman and chief executive Steven Leer said it "could be a game-changer". Chemical companies and railroads were asking him about using coal-based liquid fuels.
"It's a whole new group of potential customers," he said.
Peabody Energy chief executive Gregory Boyce said of CTL: "Stay tuned, as the sector continues to evolve.
"I have heard reports that China can produce oil for $25 per barrel from coal.
"We see it more in the $45 range here."
Peabody recently announced an agreement with Rentech to evaluate sites in the Midwest and Montana for CTL projects.
The plants could range in size from producing 10,000 to 30,000 barrels of fuel per day and use approximately three million to nine million tons of coal annually.
Another alternative fuel company, Syntroleum, said recently that its ultra-clean jet fuel was successfully tested in a USAF B-52 at Edwards Air Force Base, California.
"The programme is the first step in opening up new horizons for sourcing fuel for military purposes," said Bill Harrison, a fuels expert with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio
Dec 26 2006
Birimingham Post; Business Section
STEVE JAMES looks at how the United States is hoping to turn coal into aircraft fuel.
When railways ruled, it was the sweating firemen shovelling coal into the furnace who kept the engines running.
Now, nearly two centuries after Stephenson's "Rocket" steam locomotive helped usher in the Industrial Revolution, that same coal could be the fuel that keeps the jet age aloft.
But with a twist: The planes of the future could be flown with liquid fuel made from coal or natural gas.
Already the United States Air Force has carried out tests flying a B-52 Stratofor-tress with a coal-based fuel.
And JetBlue Airways is supporting a bill in the US Congress that would extend tax credits for alternative fuels, pushing technology to produce jet fuel for the equivalent of $40 (£20.50) a barrel - way below current oil prices.
Major coal mining companies in the United States, which has more coal reserves than Saudi Arabia has oil, are investing in ways to develop fuels derived from carbon.
The technology of producing a liquid fuel from coal or natural gas is hardly new.
The Fischer-Tropsch process was developed by German researchers Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch in 1923 and used by Germany and Japan during World War II to produce alternative fuels.
Indeed, in 1944, Germany produced 6.5 million tons, or 124,000 barrels a day.
And coal-to-liquid (CTL) fuel is already in use elsewhere, like South Africa, where it meets 30 per cent of transportation fuel needs.
In addition to being cheaper than oil, advocates point out that the fuel is environmentally friendlier and would also help America and much of the Western world wean itself off foreign oil imports.
"America must reduce its dependence on foreign oil via environmentally sound and proven coal-to-liquid technologies," said JetBlue's founder and chief executive, David Neeleman.
"Utilizing our domestic coal reserves is the right way to achieve energy independence."
In a recent briefing to power and energy executives, Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, said bio-diesel fuels offered little in the way of reduced carbon dioxide emissions, have enormous production costs and present "serious transmission and infrastructure" problems.
In contrast, CTL transportation fuels are substantially cleaner-burning than conventional fuels.
Mr Popovich warned that the United States risked falling behind economic competitors such as China, which plans to spend £13 billion on CTL plants.
America is "already behind the curve" when it comes to tapping the vast liquid fuel potential that coal offers, said John Ward, of natural resources company Headwaters, which builds CTL plants.
He said plants in America would likely each produce 40,000 barrels of CTL fuel per day, with a typical plant using 8.5 million tons of coal per year.
In contrast, China is focused on building plants capable of producing 60,000 barrels of CTL fuel per day, he said.
In October, Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer and a consortium of energy and technology companies announced the state will be home to one of America's first CTL energy plants.
The $1 billion Bull Mountain plant is set to produce 22,000 barrels per day of diesel fuel and 300 megawatts of electricity - enough to power 240,000 homes - in six years.
Mr Schweitzer and the companies behind the plant, including Arch Coal and DKRW Advanced Fuels, say the production of fuel and electricity will not release the greenhouse gases associated with coal-generated electricity.
Arch has a 25 per cent stake in DKRW and the companies are also developing a CTL plant in Medicine Bow, Wyoming.
At a recent coal industry conference, the heads of two of America's Big Four producers talked up CTL development.
Arch Coal chairman and chief executive Steven Leer said it "could be a game-changer". Chemical companies and railroads were asking him about using coal-based liquid fuels.
"It's a whole new group of potential customers," he said.
Peabody Energy chief executive Gregory Boyce said of CTL: "Stay tuned, as the sector continues to evolve.
"I have heard reports that China can produce oil for $25 per barrel from coal.
"We see it more in the $45 range here."
Peabody recently announced an agreement with Rentech to evaluate sites in the Midwest and Montana for CTL projects.
The plants could range in size from producing 10,000 to 30,000 barrels of fuel per day and use approximately three million to nine million tons of coal annually.
Another alternative fuel company, Syntroleum, said recently that its ultra-clean jet fuel was successfully tested in a USAF B-52 at Edwards Air Force Base, California.
"The programme is the first step in opening up new horizons for sourcing fuel for military purposes," said Bill Harrison, a fuels expert with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio
I dont want to be the one that left the citizens in the dark
The phrase
"I dont want to be the elected official who leaves people in dark homes".
Is going to become more and more popular among those elected officials as the reality sets in as
to what the public needs and demands and for power increases that will force local and regional
as well as national increases in generation. This debate is currently being played out in Texas,
Montanna, Kansas, Fl and on and on...
Logan Considers Whether to Support Coal-Fired Plant
December 26th, 2006 @ 1:12pm
LOGAN, Utah (AP) -- City leaders are being urged to avoid buying electricity from a new coal-fired plant in central Utah.
Environmentalists warn that Unit 3 of the Intermountain Power Plant will spoil air quality if built in Delta.
In February, Logan's Municipal Council is expected to decide whether to purchase an additional 20 megawatts of electricity at a cost of $42 million. Logan's role would help justify the need for a third power plant.
The northern Utah city already buys 44 megawatts of electricity a year but is preparing for growth.
"It's just a balancing act," Councilwoman Tami Pyfer said. "Are we going to be able to provide the citizens of Logan with reliable power or are we going to wait for better technologies to come along?
"The one position I don't want to be in is that I've left citizens in the dark," she said.
Tim Wagner of the Sierra Club said cities that help the project are contributing to global warming.
"It's old-school technology in its present form and they could do a lot better," he said.
Intermountain Power Agency is owned by nearly two dozen municipal utilities in Utah. Southern California cities purchase 75 percent of the electricity produced at units 1 and 2. Groundbreaking for Unit 3 is planned for 2008.
But many California cities interested in alternative energy have said they won't renew their contracts when agreements expire in 20 years.
Logan leaders said making a commitment to Unit 3 won't diminish their interest in alternative energy. Renewable and so-called green energy account for 30 percent.
"To refuse electric power now might be irresponsible," Councilwoman Laraine Swenson said. "We need to make sure that we're covered. Down the road, other sources will become viable."
Logan Light and Power Director Jay Larsen said signing up with Unit 3 is the right choice The deadline to participate is months away.
"I'm not real anxious to expedite this," he said. "We're looking at power for our kids and grandkids. This is something we need to carefully consider."
------ Information from: The Herald Journal, http://www.hjnews.com
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
"I dont want to be the elected official who leaves people in dark homes".
Is going to become more and more popular among those elected officials as the reality sets in as
to what the public needs and demands and for power increases that will force local and regional
as well as national increases in generation. This debate is currently being played out in Texas,
Montanna, Kansas, Fl and on and on...
Logan Considers Whether to Support Coal-Fired Plant
December 26th, 2006 @ 1:12pm
LOGAN, Utah (AP) -- City leaders are being urged to avoid buying electricity from a new coal-fired plant in central Utah.
Environmentalists warn that Unit 3 of the Intermountain Power Plant will spoil air quality if built in Delta.
In February, Logan's Municipal Council is expected to decide whether to purchase an additional 20 megawatts of electricity at a cost of $42 million. Logan's role would help justify the need for a third power plant.
The northern Utah city already buys 44 megawatts of electricity a year but is preparing for growth.
"It's just a balancing act," Councilwoman Tami Pyfer said. "Are we going to be able to provide the citizens of Logan with reliable power or are we going to wait for better technologies to come along?
"The one position I don't want to be in is that I've left citizens in the dark," she said.
Tim Wagner of the Sierra Club said cities that help the project are contributing to global warming.
"It's old-school technology in its present form and they could do a lot better," he said.
Intermountain Power Agency is owned by nearly two dozen municipal utilities in Utah. Southern California cities purchase 75 percent of the electricity produced at units 1 and 2. Groundbreaking for Unit 3 is planned for 2008.
But many California cities interested in alternative energy have said they won't renew their contracts when agreements expire in 20 years.
Logan leaders said making a commitment to Unit 3 won't diminish their interest in alternative energy. Renewable and so-called green energy account for 30 percent.
"To refuse electric power now might be irresponsible," Councilwoman Laraine Swenson said. "We need to make sure that we're covered. Down the road, other sources will become viable."
Logan Light and Power Director Jay Larsen said signing up with Unit 3 is the right choice The deadline to participate is months away.
"I'm not real anxious to expedite this," he said. "We're looking at power for our kids and grandkids. This is something we need to carefully consider."
------ Information from: The Herald Journal, http://www.hjnews.com
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
Coal has Strong Support in Montanan
Poll: Coal, wind power development have strong support; BBI does not
By MIKE DENNISON - IR State Bureau - 12/26/06
Helena Independent Record
HELENA — A majority of Montanans favor large-scale energy development in the state, whether it’s coal or alternative power sources like wind, a Lee Newspapers poll shows.More than 65 percent of those polled said they favor of both types of energy development in Montana, although alternative energy was even more popular.The poll also asked Montanans whether they like the idea of Australian-controlled firm Babcock and Brown Infrastructure buying out NorthWestern Energy, the state’s largest electric-and-gas utility.Fifty-one percent said they oppose the purchase, and only 18 percent liked the idea, leaving 31 percent undecided.The Lee Newspapers poll, conducted Dec. 13-15 asked Montanans about a variety of issues, including many that will be considered by the 2007 Legislature, which begins Jan. 3 in Helena.Energy development is expected to be one of marquee issues before the session, as Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer has made energy development a hallmark of his administration.
Schweitzer has been relentlessly promoting the use of Montana coal to produce liquid fuel, such as diesel, and electric power, through so-called ’’clean coal’’ technology that produces fewer byproducts than traditional coal-fired power plants.A few such projects are in the early development or planning stages in Montana, but none is a sure thing.Schweitzer has also been a big supporter of alternative energy and fuels, such as wind power, ethanol and biodiesel.Both Schweitzer and Republicans have plans to push bills this session aimed at encouraging energy development in the state.The poll asked Montanans whether they support large-scale coal development in the state, despite concerns by some that it will contribute to global warming.Sixty-six percent said yes, while only 23 percent said they would oppose coal development. Eleven percent said they weren’t sure.Support for such plans was especially strong among those who consider themselves Republicans, by a margin of 86 percent to 11 percent. Democrats, however, were evenly split on the idea, with 41 percent both for and against.On alternative energy, however, 75 percent said they support its development — even if it means paying slightly higher prices for electricity. Only 19 percent disagreed and 6 percent were undecided.Support for alternative energy, such as wind power, was strong among men, women, Democrats, Republicans and Independents.When it comes to the BBI purchase of NorthWestern, Montanans are far more doubtful than approving, according to the survey.BBI, which is controlled by the Australian banking group of Babcock and Brown, is proposing to pay $2.2 million for NorthWestern, the utility that serves more than 310,000 electric and gas customers in Montana.The state Public Service Commission will decide next year whether to approve the purchase.While opposition to the purchase was strong at 51 percent, the next-highest category was people who said they are undecided, at 31 percent. This large number of ’’undecideds’’ existed among all sub-groups within the poll.Women and Democrats were more strongly against the purchase, by a margin of 57 percent to 10 percent. Men, Republicans and Independents were less negative about the BBI takeover, but still opposed it by a margin of at least 19 percentage points.
By MIKE DENNISON - IR State Bureau - 12/26/06
Helena Independent Record
HELENA — A majority of Montanans favor large-scale energy development in the state, whether it’s coal or alternative power sources like wind, a Lee Newspapers poll shows.More than 65 percent of those polled said they favor of both types of energy development in Montana, although alternative energy was even more popular.The poll also asked Montanans whether they like the idea of Australian-controlled firm Babcock and Brown Infrastructure buying out NorthWestern Energy, the state’s largest electric-and-gas utility.Fifty-one percent said they oppose the purchase, and only 18 percent liked the idea, leaving 31 percent undecided.The Lee Newspapers poll, conducted Dec. 13-15 asked Montanans about a variety of issues, including many that will be considered by the 2007 Legislature, which begins Jan. 3 in Helena.Energy development is expected to be one of marquee issues before the session, as Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer has made energy development a hallmark of his administration.
Schweitzer has been relentlessly promoting the use of Montana coal to produce liquid fuel, such as diesel, and electric power, through so-called ’’clean coal’’ technology that produces fewer byproducts than traditional coal-fired power plants.A few such projects are in the early development or planning stages in Montana, but none is a sure thing.Schweitzer has also been a big supporter of alternative energy and fuels, such as wind power, ethanol and biodiesel.Both Schweitzer and Republicans have plans to push bills this session aimed at encouraging energy development in the state.The poll asked Montanans whether they support large-scale coal development in the state, despite concerns by some that it will contribute to global warming.Sixty-six percent said yes, while only 23 percent said they would oppose coal development. Eleven percent said they weren’t sure.Support for such plans was especially strong among those who consider themselves Republicans, by a margin of 86 percent to 11 percent. Democrats, however, were evenly split on the idea, with 41 percent both for and against.On alternative energy, however, 75 percent said they support its development — even if it means paying slightly higher prices for electricity. Only 19 percent disagreed and 6 percent were undecided.Support for alternative energy, such as wind power, was strong among men, women, Democrats, Republicans and Independents.When it comes to the BBI purchase of NorthWestern, Montanans are far more doubtful than approving, according to the survey.BBI, which is controlled by the Australian banking group of Babcock and Brown, is proposing to pay $2.2 million for NorthWestern, the utility that serves more than 310,000 electric and gas customers in Montana.The state Public Service Commission will decide next year whether to approve the purchase.While opposition to the purchase was strong at 51 percent, the next-highest category was people who said they are undecided, at 31 percent. This large number of ’’undecideds’’ existed among all sub-groups within the poll.Women and Democrats were more strongly against the purchase, by a margin of 57 percent to 10 percent. Men, Republicans and Independents were less negative about the BBI takeover, but still opposed it by a margin of at least 19 percentage points.
Is a ban on coal power plants unrealistic? ?
PRO-CON: Is a ban on coal power plants unrealistic?
YES ! !
* Kansas City Star *
Posted on Tue, Dec. 26, 2006
It is easy enough for naysayers to take shots at power-generating coal plants, but the reality is that coal provides nearly 80 percent of all electric generation throughout the Midwest, and the emissions from production are heavily regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency to ensure clean air.
Coal generation stations also provide excellent jobs in many rural areas, and their locations are an attraction for other industry that can piggyback on recycling steam, hot water and fly ash.
Opponents are clamoring to have Gov. Kathleen Sebelius ban permits for new coal plants.
Perhaps the current criticism is prompted by Sunflower Electric’s desire to locate three plants in western Kansas. But calling for a total ban on permits is unrealistic.
The Parsons (Kan.) Sun
YES ! !
* Kansas City Star *
Posted on Tue, Dec. 26, 2006
It is easy enough for naysayers to take shots at power-generating coal plants, but the reality is that coal provides nearly 80 percent of all electric generation throughout the Midwest, and the emissions from production are heavily regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency to ensure clean air.
Coal generation stations also provide excellent jobs in many rural areas, and their locations are an attraction for other industry that can piggyback on recycling steam, hot water and fly ash.
Opponents are clamoring to have Gov. Kathleen Sebelius ban permits for new coal plants.
Perhaps the current criticism is prompted by Sunflower Electric’s desire to locate three plants in western Kansas. But calling for a total ban on permits is unrealistic.
The Parsons (Kan.) Sun
AML "mine land bill" reauthorization "Trust Fund"
Mine bill renewal called 'life-saving'
Dec 27, 2006
Pittsburgh Tribune Review
A.J. PanianTRIBUNE REVIEW
In 2003, mine land reclamation groups from 10 states met in Westmoreland County to help R. John Dawes compile what he called a "wish list."
The document asked the federal government for reauthorization of the Abandoned Mine Lands Trust Fund, mandatory spending on reclamation projects and fair funding distribution among states with the longest histories of surface coal mining, said Dawes, chairman of the Pennsylvania Abandoned Minelands Campaign.
This month, Congress passed a bill that would meet the group's requests and provide what Dawes calls "life-saving legislation."
President Bush signed the bill into law last week.
"It's very, very exciting for those concerned about preserving the environment and safety of our communities that this bill passed," Dawes said.
The Abandoned Mine Lands Trust Fund was created in 1977 with passage of the federal Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act. As part of the act, the federal Office of Surface Mining conducted a nationwide inventory of abandoned mine sites and established a priority-ranking system for the danger level of such sites.
The law will reauthorize the funding source supporting the mine lands fund for another 15 years at a cost of $15 billion. Of that amount, $1 billion is slated for Pennsylvania communities to clear hazardous and polluting coal-mine sites.
The abandoned mine lands program had been operating under a series of short-term, one-year extensions for the past three years. The increased funding for the state will be phased in over a five-year period, said Tom Rathbun, spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection in Harrisburg.
Statewide, five deaths were reported last year on about 184,000 acres of abandoned mine lands. Toxins from such sites have left about 4,000 miles of streams and rivers biologically dead, he said.
The reauthorized legislation, which extends the fund through 2021, calls for the following changes from the previously authorized Abandoned Mine Lands Trust Fund:
• The allocation of abandoned mine lands cleanup funds has been taken "off-budget," meaning the annual expenditure of the money doesn't require congressional approval.
• A far greater portion of the fund will be allocated for actual reclamation of Priority 1 and 2 sites, which are known for dangerous highwalls, unmarked shafts, unstable cliffs, water-filled pits and abandoned equipment and buildings. In the past, Congress did not appropriate the entire amount for mine cleanups.
"The primary advantages to Pennsylvania and other Eastern states are that this removes the abandoned mine program from the political arena and allows us to engage in long-term planning and budgeting," Rathbun said.
The tax on the active mining industry -- the sole source of funding for the abandoned mine program -- will be reduced by 20 percent over the next six years.
Dawes and Bruce Golden, regional coordinator for the Western Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation, said they are most encouraged by the projected increase in the "set-aside" program, which allows states to stockpile up to 10 percent of their annual federal grant for cleanup of mine drainage. That amount has been increased to 30 percent, but spending remains discretionary for each state.
"If we are not careful how this money is allocated, we could find ourselves in 15 years with significant problems still to address and no guarantee that the AML Fund will be extended again," Rathbun said.
Either way, the state must be prepared to use whatever money it receives in the most efficiently strategic way possible, said Bev Braverman, executive director of the Mountain Watershed Association.
"Part of that money needs to be spent on really looking at the inventory of problems and engineering project designs, and that needs to be done sooner than later if we're going to spend more money down the road," Braverman said. "We want this money to really beef up the reclamation program that Pennsylvania already has in place."
Gov. Ed Rendell lauded all individuals and groups involved with expressing the state's dire need for the fund's long-term reauthorization by Congress.
"It is a major victory for Pennsylvania's environment and economy, and much of the credit goes to the environmental groups, members of Congress, coal companies and mine workers who have worked so hard to win approval of this measure," Rendell said.
Dec 27, 2006
Pittsburgh Tribune Review
A.J. PanianTRIBUNE REVIEW
In 2003, mine land reclamation groups from 10 states met in Westmoreland County to help R. John Dawes compile what he called a "wish list."
The document asked the federal government for reauthorization of the Abandoned Mine Lands Trust Fund, mandatory spending on reclamation projects and fair funding distribution among states with the longest histories of surface coal mining, said Dawes, chairman of the Pennsylvania Abandoned Minelands Campaign.
This month, Congress passed a bill that would meet the group's requests and provide what Dawes calls "life-saving legislation."
President Bush signed the bill into law last week.
"It's very, very exciting for those concerned about preserving the environment and safety of our communities that this bill passed," Dawes said.
The Abandoned Mine Lands Trust Fund was created in 1977 with passage of the federal Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act. As part of the act, the federal Office of Surface Mining conducted a nationwide inventory of abandoned mine sites and established a priority-ranking system for the danger level of such sites.
The law will reauthorize the funding source supporting the mine lands fund for another 15 years at a cost of $15 billion. Of that amount, $1 billion is slated for Pennsylvania communities to clear hazardous and polluting coal-mine sites.
The abandoned mine lands program had been operating under a series of short-term, one-year extensions for the past three years. The increased funding for the state will be phased in over a five-year period, said Tom Rathbun, spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection in Harrisburg.
Statewide, five deaths were reported last year on about 184,000 acres of abandoned mine lands. Toxins from such sites have left about 4,000 miles of streams and rivers biologically dead, he said.
The reauthorized legislation, which extends the fund through 2021, calls for the following changes from the previously authorized Abandoned Mine Lands Trust Fund:
• The allocation of abandoned mine lands cleanup funds has been taken "off-budget," meaning the annual expenditure of the money doesn't require congressional approval.
• A far greater portion of the fund will be allocated for actual reclamation of Priority 1 and 2 sites, which are known for dangerous highwalls, unmarked shafts, unstable cliffs, water-filled pits and abandoned equipment and buildings. In the past, Congress did not appropriate the entire amount for mine cleanups.
"The primary advantages to Pennsylvania and other Eastern states are that this removes the abandoned mine program from the political arena and allows us to engage in long-term planning and budgeting," Rathbun said.
The tax on the active mining industry -- the sole source of funding for the abandoned mine program -- will be reduced by 20 percent over the next six years.
Dawes and Bruce Golden, regional coordinator for the Western Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation, said they are most encouraged by the projected increase in the "set-aside" program, which allows states to stockpile up to 10 percent of their annual federal grant for cleanup of mine drainage. That amount has been increased to 30 percent, but spending remains discretionary for each state.
"If we are not careful how this money is allocated, we could find ourselves in 15 years with significant problems still to address and no guarantee that the AML Fund will be extended again," Rathbun said.
Either way, the state must be prepared to use whatever money it receives in the most efficiently strategic way possible, said Bev Braverman, executive director of the Mountain Watershed Association.
"Part of that money needs to be spent on really looking at the inventory of problems and engineering project designs, and that needs to be done sooner than later if we're going to spend more money down the road," Braverman said. "We want this money to really beef up the reclamation program that Pennsylvania already has in place."
Gov. Ed Rendell lauded all individuals and groups involved with expressing the state's dire need for the fund's long-term reauthorization by Congress.
"It is a major victory for Pennsylvania's environment and economy, and much of the credit goes to the environmental groups, members of Congress, coal companies and mine workers who have worked so hard to win approval of this measure," Rendell said.
Illegal Power Plants in China
Illegal Power Plants, Coal Mines In China Pose Challenge for Beijing
Dec 27, 2006
Illegal Power Plants, Coal Mines In China Pose Challenge for Beijing
Dec 27, 2006
Wall Street Journal, Print Edition
SHAI OSTER
JUBAO VILLAGE, China -- On the edge of this dusty farming hamlet, the massive smokestack of the half-finished Xinfeng Power Plant looms as a monument to China's out-of-control demand for energy.
Unlike two other power plants nearby, Xinfeng isn't supposed to exist. China's electricity regulators never authorized the $362 million coal-burning plant. But in 2004, the provincial government here in northern China's Inner Mongolia ignored Beijing's call to slow down investment and started building the plant anyway, hoping to ensure enough juice for the region's supercharged industrialization by tapping its rich reservoirs of coal.
Inner Mongolia's disobedience might have escaped notice. But in July 2005, in the rush to finish the plant before regulators found out about it, the housing for a turbine collapsed, killing six workers. During the yearlong investigation that followed, the central government discovered that Inner Mongolia had illegally built about 10 power plants, or 8.6 gigawatts of electricity-generating capacity -- equal to about a 10th of the United Kingdom's total capacity.
The illegal plants have had unintended -- and detrimental -- consequences. By eschewing even basic environmental safeguards, they stand out as polluters even in an industry that is one of China's leading sources of emissions, officials say. They also have driven up the demand for and price of coal, the country's most abundant source of fuel. That, in turn, has spawned thousands of illegal coal mines that have contributed to more than 4,000 coal-mining deaths in China this year.
The illegal power plants show how China's economic transformation is outpacing Beijing's ability to manage it. Never before has a country with such a big population grown as rapidly as China. The country's economy has expanded an average 10% a year since the late 1970s. The process of economic modernization is happening twice as fast in China as it did in the U.S. or Japan, where it took half a century or more.
One fifth of the power plants in China are illegal, according to government estimates -- enough to light up all of the U.K. While the electricity they supply is essential to power China's growth, the uncontrolled manner in which they are multiplying, often under the protection of local authorities, poses a challenge to Beijing's authority and its grip on energy policy.
"It is impossible for our central government to go everywhere to see, when the small power plants start building," said Zhang Guobao, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top energy policy planner, in an interview.
The central government is likewise finding it hard to crack down on illegal coal mines. In past years it has shut down thousands of mines -- only to see thousands more spring up in their place. The primary reason: the soaring profits to be made from selling coal to China's power plants are a powerful temptation. Many regions have embraced coal mining to boost their growth rates, including Inner Mongolia, one of China's most coal-rich provinces.
Infuriated by the illegal Xinfeng power plant, central-government officials earlier this year demanded that the province's top leadership present self-criticisms before China's powerful State Council, or cabinet. Under China's Communist system, that's an unusually public form of rebuke, designed to send a message to others against defying Beijing's will.
Even so, construction continues today at the Xinfeng plant nearly a year after Beijing ordered it stopped. Officials at the company building the plant say they expect to get approval to complete it "sooner or later."
In China, more power plants almost invariably mean more coal consumption. The country has been unable to diversify away from coal, which is cheaper than alternative fuels, some of which are imported.
But China's coal consumption is costly in human and environmental terms. Amid the push to feed the country's power plants last year, 5,938 coal miners were killed in accidents, mostly in smaller, illegal mines. Such accidents are so commonplace here that only the larger ones rank as news.
Coal is one of the biggest pollution sources in China, which some experts think is on the verge of an environmental crisis. This year, the central government set a target of reducing the amount of energy the country consumes relative to its economic output. But the soaring demand for coal-fueled electricity has upended Beijing's efforts to rein in pollution.
"It will be very difficult to realize our targets of saving energy and reducing pollution," Ma Kai, China's top economic policy planner, said this fall.
The implications of China's mushrooming hunger for energy go far beyond its own borders. As incomes rise in China, energy use per person is starting to catch up with the richer West. The typical American consumes about eight metric tons of oil a year, or its equivalent in coal and other fuels. Japanese consume about half that sum. In China, per capita energy consumption now stands at just 1.2 metric tons.
It would require a doubling of world oil production -- an impossible feat -- for every Chinese to live the energy-intensive lifestyle of an American, as well as more coal than some believe China could ever dig up.
"We can't copy the big home and the big car" that so many Americans enjoy, said Zhou Dadi, a top researcher with the Energy Research Institute, a government-backed think tank. "It's just not doable."
China's current energy predicament is rooted in the decision it made three decades ago when it began to embrace a market economy. For the first 20 years of its transition, as China shifted from a mostly agrarian country to light industry, it was able to quadruple the size of its economy while only doubling its energy needs.
Throughout the 1990s, however, a new and faster phase of expansion quietly took hold as the government loosened restrictions on investment and the mobility of its citizens, accelerating China's industrialization and urbanization. Manufacturing accounted for a steadily greater share of the economy. Energy-intensive heavy industries boomed, from petrochemicals to auto production, aided by China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.
Low energy prices, made possible in part by government controls, encouraged consumers to use more. Coal consumption initially crept up slowly, to around 1.5 billion metric tons a year in the mid-1990s, from just under one billion metric tons a year a decade earlier. Last year, however, China consumed about 2.2 billion metric tons of coal, one-third of the world's total and more than any other country.
Beijing's efforts to reduce reliance on coal have largely failed. China has plenty of coal -- an estimated 114.5 billion metric tons of recoverable reserves. Only the U.S. and Russia have more. Natural gas, which burns more efficiently and causes far less pollution, has proved too expensive to compete effectively. Planned increases in nuclear-power production would fill only a fraction of China's energy demand. Even China's more-ambitious plans for hydropower power and wind farms won't seriously challenge coal's dominance.
Coal miners are on the front lines of the battle to meet China's energy needs. It is dangerous work. As with power plants, China's government has had great difficulty regulating coal mines. In the U.S., which produces about half as much coal as China, 47 miners have been killed so far this year, up from 22 last year. In China, the number of deaths has declined slightly this year, but it is still enormous: 4,236 dead so far.
The number of casualties goes up in the winter. More than 400 miners died in November alone. "In winter, demand goes up, the market prices go up, and the profit motive goes up," said Huang Yi, spokesman for the State Administration of Worker Safety, the agency that investigates mine accidents.
Smaller, often inefficient, and dangerous mines account for about a third of China's coal production. They are so important to meeting its energy needs that the central government recently delayed plans to improve safety by shuttering many of them.
Whole regions of China are pockmarked with tiny, illegal mines like the one in Wangyu in central China's gritty Shanxi province, where an accident in early November killed 34 miners. Four tons of demolition explosives illegally stored in a shaft caught fire and destroyed the small mine, according to government safety officials. The dead, who had just started the night shift, were mostly from the same village some 250 miles away.
Wang Chenliang, from Sichuan province, had just ended his shift when the explosion occurred. He rushed back to help with rescue efforts. He and others pulled survivors from the wreckage and pumped air into the mine to aid anyone who was trapped but still alive.
"This work is tiring and dangerous," Mr. Wang said a few days after the accident, only moments before police detained a journalist attempting to interview survivors. Like others, he got his job through introductions from fellow villagers. "We came here to earn money. The money here is much higher than back home in Sichuan."
The mine's safety certificate and production permit had both expired, according to central-government officials. But the local government was protecting it, they said, because it held a financial interest in the mine.
That sort of corruption is common. Last year, the central government found that more than 4,500 government officials illegally held stakes in coal mines and frequently covered up safety violations. Many of these mines lack basic safety equipment. Workers scrabble down narrow pits, where the most modern tools may be the sticks of dynamite used to dislodge the coal. At the accident site in Wangyu, there was no rescue equipment on hand, another common problem.
Over the past few years, provincial officials in Inner Mongolia have decided to build power plants and encourage heavy industry to relocate to the region to take advantage of its coal resources. The strategy has paid off in economic terms.
Last year, the province's economy grew 21.6%, roughly double the national rate. In 2004, it grew 19.4%. Industrial output has grown an average 30% a year over the past four years. Such unbridled growth caught China's central government off guard.
In 2003 and 2004, massive power shortages in the south led to rolling blackouts. Local authorities across China decided to build power plants, often illegally, to keep their local economies humming. Around that time, officials in Inner Mongolia approved a plan to build the Xinfeng Power Plant in the small town of Fengzhen, in a bid to attract more factories.
"Inner Mongolia has a lot of coal. Other parts of China need the electricity. Of course Inner Mongolia should take advantage of its natural resources," said Yan Keji, a construction worker at one of the three power plants near Jubao.
It isn't just heavy industry that needs power. China's consumers are using more, too. Mr. Yan's hometown in the mountains of Hunan didn't have electricity until 1990. At first, his house had one light bulb. Now, the money he earns from construction has paid for a television, washing machine, refrigerator and air conditioning, a pattern repeated in millions of homes across China as people get richer.
China's sprawling cities are also driving up power demand. Inner Mongolia now provides Beijing with 20% of its electricity, according to Jim Brock, an independent energy consultant in the Chinese capital.
Nearly two years ago, China's central government started cracking down on the unauthorized power plants because they feared a surplus of power. In Inner Mongolia, local officials ignored orders to stop building the Xingfeng plant, figuring they could always get retroactive approval, according to the official Xinhua news agency. But the death of the six workers in July 2005 set in motion the investigation that culminated in the public castigation of the provincial chief and the order to stop work on Xinfeng.
Some construction work on the plant continues. Workers interviewed at the site said the plant would be able to produce electricity next year. They declined to give their names.
Na Guiting, an official at Inner Mongolia Energy Generation Investment Co. Ltd., the plant's owner, said the company is eager to finish building and has reapplied for approval. "Mongolia still has a very serious power shortage. If Xinfeng would be approved, it could be generating in three or four months," the official said.
--Kersten Zhang contributed to this article.
Write to Shai Oster at shai.oster@dowjones.comSHAI OSTER
JUBAO VILLAGE, China -- On the edge of this dusty farming hamlet, the massive smokestack of the half-finished Xinfeng Power Plant looms as a monument to China's out-of-control demand for energy.
Unlike two other power plants nearby, Xinfeng isn't supposed to exist. China's electricity regulators never authorized the $362 million coal-burning plant. But in 2004, the provincial government here in northern China's Inner Mongolia ignored Beijing's call to slow down investment and started building the plant anyway, hoping to ensure enough juice for the region's supercharged industrialization by tapping its rich reservoirs of coal.
Inner Mongolia's disobedience might have escaped notice. But in July 2005, in the rush to finish the plant before regulators found out about it, the housing for a turbine collapsed, killing six workers. During the yearlong investigation that followed, the central government discovered that Inner Mongolia had illegally built about 10 power plants, or 8.6 gigawatts of electricity-generating capacity -- equal to about a 10th of the United Kingdom's total capacity.
The illegal plants have had unintended -- and detrimental -- consequences. By eschewing even basic environmental safeguards, they stand out as polluters even in an industry that is one of China's leading sources of emissions, officials say. They also have driven up the demand for and price of coal, the country's most abundant source of fuel. That, in turn, has spawned thousands of illegal coal mines that have contributed to more than 4,000 coal-mining deaths in China this year.
The illegal power plants show how China's economic transformation is outpacing Beijing's ability to manage it. Never before has a country with such a big population grown as rapidly as China. The country's economy has expanded an average 10% a year since the late 1970s. The process of economic modernization is happening twice as fast in China as it did in the U.S. or Japan, where it took half a century or more.
One fifth of the power plants in China are illegal, according to government estimates -- enough to light up all of the U.K. While the electricity they supply is essential to power China's growth, the uncontrolled manner in which they are multiplying, often under the protection of local authorities, poses a challenge to Beijing's authority and its grip on energy policy.
"It is impossible for our central government to go everywhere to see, when the small power plants start building," said Zhang Guobao, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top energy policy planner, in an interview.
The central government is likewise finding it hard to crack down on illegal coal mines. In past years it has shut down thousands of mines -- only to see thousands more spring up in their place. The primary reason: the soaring profits to be made from selling coal to China's power plants are a powerful temptation. Many regions have embraced coal mining to boost their growth rates, including Inner Mongolia, one of China's most coal-rich provinces.
Infuriated by the illegal Xinfeng power plant, central-government officials earlier this year demanded that the province's top leadership present self-criticisms before China's powerful State Council, or cabinet. Under China's Communist system, that's an unusually public form of rebuke, designed to send a message to others against defying Beijing's will.
Even so, construction continues today at the Xinfeng plant nearly a year after Beijing ordered it stopped. Officials at the company building the plant say they expect to get approval to complete it "sooner or later."
In China, more power plants almost invariably mean more coal consumption. The country has been unable to diversify away from coal, which is cheaper than alternative fuels, some of which are imported.
But China's coal consumption is costly in human and environmental terms. Amid the push to feed the country's power plants last year, 5,938 coal miners were killed in accidents, mostly in smaller, illegal mines. Such accidents are so commonplace here that only the larger ones rank as news.
Coal is one of the biggest pollution sources in China, which some experts think is on the verge of an environmental crisis. This year, the central government set a target of reducing the amount of energy the country consumes relative to its economic output. But the soaring demand for coal-fueled electricity has upended Beijing's efforts to rein in pollution.
"It will be very difficult to realize our targets of saving energy and reducing pollution," Ma Kai, China's top economic policy planner, said this fall.
The implications of China's mushrooming hunger for energy go far beyond its own borders. As incomes rise in China, energy use per person is starting to catch up with the richer West. The typical American consumes about eight metric tons of oil a year, or its equivalent in coal and other fuels. Japanese consume about half that sum. In China, per capita energy consumption now stands at just 1.2 metric tons.
It would require a doubling of world oil production -- an impossible feat -- for every Chinese to live the energy-intensive lifestyle of an American, as well as more coal than some believe China could ever dig up.
"We can't copy the big home and the big car" that so many Americans enjoy, said Zhou Dadi, a top researcher with the Energy Research Institute, a government-backed think tank. "It's just not doable."
China's current energy predicament is rooted in the decision it made three decades ago when it began to embrace a market economy. For the first 20 years of its transition, as China shifted from a mostly agrarian country to light industry, it was able to quadruple the size of its economy while only doubling its energy needs.
Throughout the 1990s, however, a new and faster phase of expansion quietly took hold as the government loosened restrictions on investment and the mobility of its citizens, accelerating China's industrialization and urbanization. Manufacturing accounted for a steadily greater share of the economy. Energy-intensive heavy industries boomed, from petrochemicals to auto production, aided by China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.
Low energy prices, made possible in part by government controls, encouraged consumers to use more. Coal consumption initially crept up slowly, to around 1.5 billion metric tons a year in the mid-1990s, from just under one billion metric tons a year a decade earlier. Last year, however, China consumed about 2.2 billion metric tons of coal, one-third of the world's total and more than any other country.
Beijing's efforts to reduce reliance on coal have largely failed. China has plenty of coal -- an estimated 114.5 billion metric tons of recoverable reserves. Only the U.S. and Russia have more. Natural gas, which burns more efficiently and causes far less pollution, has proved too expensive to compete effectively. Planned increases in nuclear-power production would fill only a fraction of China's energy demand. Even China's more-ambitious plans for hydropower power and wind farms won't seriously challenge coal's dominance.
Coal miners are on the front lines of the battle to meet China's energy needs. It is dangerous work. As with power plants, China's government has had great difficulty regulating coal mines. In the U.S., which produces about half as much coal as China, 47 miners have been killed so far this year, up from 22 last year. In China, the number of deaths has declined slightly this year, but it is still enormous: 4,236 dead so far.
The number of casualties goes up in the winter. More than 400 miners died in November alone. "In winter, demand goes up, the market prices go up, and the profit motive goes up," said Huang Yi, spokesman for the State Administration of Worker Safety, the agency that investigates mine accidents.
Smaller, often inefficient, and dangerous mines account for about a third of China's coal production. They are so important to meeting its energy needs that the central government recently delayed plans to improve safety by shuttering many of them.
Whole regions of China are pockmarked with tiny, illegal mines like the one in Wangyu in central China's gritty Shanxi province, where an accident in early November killed 34 miners. Four tons of demolition explosives illegally stored in a shaft caught fire and destroyed the small mine, according to government safety officials. The dead, who had just started the night shift, were mostly from the same village some 250 miles away.
Wang Chenliang, from Sichuan province, had just ended his shift when the explosion occurred. He rushed back to help with rescue efforts. He and others pulled survivors from the wreckage and pumped air into the mine to aid anyone who was trapped but still alive.
"This work is tiring and dangerous," Mr. Wang said a few days after the accident, only moments before police detained a journalist attempting to interview survivors. Like others, he got his job through introductions from fellow villagers. "We came here to earn money. The money here is much higher than back home in Sichuan."
The mine's safety certificate and production permit had both expired, according to central-government officials. But the local government was protecting it, they said, because it held a financial interest in the mine.
That sort of corruption is common. Last year, the central government found that more than 4,500 government officials illegally held stakes in coal mines and frequently covered up safety violations. Many of these mines lack basic safety equipment. Workers scrabble down narrow pits, where the most modern tools may be the sticks of dynamite used to dislodge the coal. At the accident site in Wangyu, there was no rescue equipment on hand, another common problem.
Over the past few years, provincial officials in Inner Mongolia have decided to build power plants and encourage heavy industry to relocate to the region to take advantage of its coal resources. The strategy has paid off in economic terms.
Last year, the province's economy grew 21.6%, roughly double the national rate. In 2004, it grew 19.4%. Industrial output has grown an average 30% a year over the past four years. Such unbridled growth caught China's central government off guard.
In 2003 and 2004, massive power shortages in the south led to rolling blackouts. Local authorities across China decided to build power plants, often illegally, to keep their local economies humming. Around that time, officials in Inner Mongolia approved a plan to build the Xinfeng Power Plant in the small town of Fengzhen, in a bid to attract more factories.
"Inner Mongolia has a lot of coal. Other parts of China need the electricity. Of course Inner Mongolia should take advantage of its natural resources," said Yan Keji, a construction worker at one of the three power plants near Jubao.
It isn't just heavy industry that needs power. China's consumers are using more, too. Mr. Yan's hometown in the mountains of Hunan didn't have electricity until 1990. At first, his house had one light bulb. Now, the money he earns from construction has paid for a television, washing machine, refrigerator and air conditioning, a pattern repeated in millions of homes across China as people get richer.
China's sprawling cities are also driving up power demand. Inner Mongolia now provides Beijing with 20% of its electricity, according to Jim Brock, an independent energy consultant in the Chinese capital.
Nearly two years ago, China's central government started cracking down on the unauthorized power plants because they feared a surplus of power. In Inner Mongolia, local officials ignored orders to stop building the Xingfeng plant, figuring they could always get retroactive approval, according to the official Xinhua news agency. But the death of the six workers in July 2005 set in motion the investigation that culminated in the public castigation of the provincial chief and the order to stop work on Xinfeng.
Some construction work on the plant continues. Workers interviewed at the site said the plant would be able to produce electricity next year. They declined to give their names.
Na Guiting, an official at Inner Mongolia Energy Generation Investment Co. Ltd., the plant's owner, said the company is eager to finish building and has reapplied for approval. "Mongolia still has a very serious power shortage. If Xinfeng would be approved, it could be generating in three or four months," the official said.
--Kersten Zhang contributed to this article.
Write to Shai Oster at shai.oster@dowjones.com
Dec 27, 2006
Illegal Power Plants, Coal Mines In China Pose Challenge for Beijing
Dec 27, 2006
Wall Street Journal, Print Edition
SHAI OSTER
JUBAO VILLAGE, China -- On the edge of this dusty farming hamlet, the massive smokestack of the half-finished Xinfeng Power Plant looms as a monument to China's out-of-control demand for energy.
Unlike two other power plants nearby, Xinfeng isn't supposed to exist. China's electricity regulators never authorized the $362 million coal-burning plant. But in 2004, the provincial government here in northern China's Inner Mongolia ignored Beijing's call to slow down investment and started building the plant anyway, hoping to ensure enough juice for the region's supercharged industrialization by tapping its rich reservoirs of coal.
Inner Mongolia's disobedience might have escaped notice. But in July 2005, in the rush to finish the plant before regulators found out about it, the housing for a turbine collapsed, killing six workers. During the yearlong investigation that followed, the central government discovered that Inner Mongolia had illegally built about 10 power plants, or 8.6 gigawatts of electricity-generating capacity -- equal to about a 10th of the United Kingdom's total capacity.
The illegal plants have had unintended -- and detrimental -- consequences. By eschewing even basic environmental safeguards, they stand out as polluters even in an industry that is one of China's leading sources of emissions, officials say. They also have driven up the demand for and price of coal, the country's most abundant source of fuel. That, in turn, has spawned thousands of illegal coal mines that have contributed to more than 4,000 coal-mining deaths in China this year.
The illegal power plants show how China's economic transformation is outpacing Beijing's ability to manage it. Never before has a country with such a big population grown as rapidly as China. The country's economy has expanded an average 10% a year since the late 1970s. The process of economic modernization is happening twice as fast in China as it did in the U.S. or Japan, where it took half a century or more.
One fifth of the power plants in China are illegal, according to government estimates -- enough to light up all of the U.K. While the electricity they supply is essential to power China's growth, the uncontrolled manner in which they are multiplying, often under the protection of local authorities, poses a challenge to Beijing's authority and its grip on energy policy.
"It is impossible for our central government to go everywhere to see, when the small power plants start building," said Zhang Guobao, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top energy policy planner, in an interview.
The central government is likewise finding it hard to crack down on illegal coal mines. In past years it has shut down thousands of mines -- only to see thousands more spring up in their place. The primary reason: the soaring profits to be made from selling coal to China's power plants are a powerful temptation. Many regions have embraced coal mining to boost their growth rates, including Inner Mongolia, one of China's most coal-rich provinces.
Infuriated by the illegal Xinfeng power plant, central-government officials earlier this year demanded that the province's top leadership present self-criticisms before China's powerful State Council, or cabinet. Under China's Communist system, that's an unusually public form of rebuke, designed to send a message to others against defying Beijing's will.
Even so, construction continues today at the Xinfeng plant nearly a year after Beijing ordered it stopped. Officials at the company building the plant say they expect to get approval to complete it "sooner or later."
In China, more power plants almost invariably mean more coal consumption. The country has been unable to diversify away from coal, which is cheaper than alternative fuels, some of which are imported.
But China's coal consumption is costly in human and environmental terms. Amid the push to feed the country's power plants last year, 5,938 coal miners were killed in accidents, mostly in smaller, illegal mines. Such accidents are so commonplace here that only the larger ones rank as news.
Coal is one of the biggest pollution sources in China, which some experts think is on the verge of an environmental crisis. This year, the central government set a target of reducing the amount of energy the country consumes relative to its economic output. But the soaring demand for coal-fueled electricity has upended Beijing's efforts to rein in pollution.
"It will be very difficult to realize our targets of saving energy and reducing pollution," Ma Kai, China's top economic policy planner, said this fall.
The implications of China's mushrooming hunger for energy go far beyond its own borders. As incomes rise in China, energy use per person is starting to catch up with the richer West. The typical American consumes about eight metric tons of oil a year, or its equivalent in coal and other fuels. Japanese consume about half that sum. In China, per capita energy consumption now stands at just 1.2 metric tons.
It would require a doubling of world oil production -- an impossible feat -- for every Chinese to live the energy-intensive lifestyle of an American, as well as more coal than some believe China could ever dig up.
"We can't copy the big home and the big car" that so many Americans enjoy, said Zhou Dadi, a top researcher with the Energy Research Institute, a government-backed think tank. "It's just not doable."
China's current energy predicament is rooted in the decision it made three decades ago when it began to embrace a market economy. For the first 20 years of its transition, as China shifted from a mostly agrarian country to light industry, it was able to quadruple the size of its economy while only doubling its energy needs.
Throughout the 1990s, however, a new and faster phase of expansion quietly took hold as the government loosened restrictions on investment and the mobility of its citizens, accelerating China's industrialization and urbanization. Manufacturing accounted for a steadily greater share of the economy. Energy-intensive heavy industries boomed, from petrochemicals to auto production, aided by China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.
Low energy prices, made possible in part by government controls, encouraged consumers to use more. Coal consumption initially crept up slowly, to around 1.5 billion metric tons a year in the mid-1990s, from just under one billion metric tons a year a decade earlier. Last year, however, China consumed about 2.2 billion metric tons of coal, one-third of the world's total and more than any other country.
Beijing's efforts to reduce reliance on coal have largely failed. China has plenty of coal -- an estimated 114.5 billion metric tons of recoverable reserves. Only the U.S. and Russia have more. Natural gas, which burns more efficiently and causes far less pollution, has proved too expensive to compete effectively. Planned increases in nuclear-power production would fill only a fraction of China's energy demand. Even China's more-ambitious plans for hydropower power and wind farms won't seriously challenge coal's dominance.
Coal miners are on the front lines of the battle to meet China's energy needs. It is dangerous work. As with power plants, China's government has had great difficulty regulating coal mines. In the U.S., which produces about half as much coal as China, 47 miners have been killed so far this year, up from 22 last year. In China, the number of deaths has declined slightly this year, but it is still enormous: 4,236 dead so far.
The number of casualties goes up in the winter. More than 400 miners died in November alone. "In winter, demand goes up, the market prices go up, and the profit motive goes up," said Huang Yi, spokesman for the State Administration of Worker Safety, the agency that investigates mine accidents.
Smaller, often inefficient, and dangerous mines account for about a third of China's coal production. They are so important to meeting its energy needs that the central government recently delayed plans to improve safety by shuttering many of them.
Whole regions of China are pockmarked with tiny, illegal mines like the one in Wangyu in central China's gritty Shanxi province, where an accident in early November killed 34 miners. Four tons of demolition explosives illegally stored in a shaft caught fire and destroyed the small mine, according to government safety officials. The dead, who had just started the night shift, were mostly from the same village some 250 miles away.
Wang Chenliang, from Sichuan province, had just ended his shift when the explosion occurred. He rushed back to help with rescue efforts. He and others pulled survivors from the wreckage and pumped air into the mine to aid anyone who was trapped but still alive.
"This work is tiring and dangerous," Mr. Wang said a few days after the accident, only moments before police detained a journalist attempting to interview survivors. Like others, he got his job through introductions from fellow villagers. "We came here to earn money. The money here is much higher than back home in Sichuan."
The mine's safety certificate and production permit had both expired, according to central-government officials. But the local government was protecting it, they said, because it held a financial interest in the mine.
That sort of corruption is common. Last year, the central government found that more than 4,500 government officials illegally held stakes in coal mines and frequently covered up safety violations. Many of these mines lack basic safety equipment. Workers scrabble down narrow pits, where the most modern tools may be the sticks of dynamite used to dislodge the coal. At the accident site in Wangyu, there was no rescue equipment on hand, another common problem.
Over the past few years, provincial officials in Inner Mongolia have decided to build power plants and encourage heavy industry to relocate to the region to take advantage of its coal resources. The strategy has paid off in economic terms.
Last year, the province's economy grew 21.6%, roughly double the national rate. In 2004, it grew 19.4%. Industrial output has grown an average 30% a year over the past four years. Such unbridled growth caught China's central government off guard.
In 2003 and 2004, massive power shortages in the south led to rolling blackouts. Local authorities across China decided to build power plants, often illegally, to keep their local economies humming. Around that time, officials in Inner Mongolia approved a plan to build the Xinfeng Power Plant in the small town of Fengzhen, in a bid to attract more factories.
"Inner Mongolia has a lot of coal. Other parts of China need the electricity. Of course Inner Mongolia should take advantage of its natural resources," said Yan Keji, a construction worker at one of the three power plants near Jubao.
It isn't just heavy industry that needs power. China's consumers are using more, too. Mr. Yan's hometown in the mountains of Hunan didn't have electricity until 1990. At first, his house had one light bulb. Now, the money he earns from construction has paid for a television, washing machine, refrigerator and air conditioning, a pattern repeated in millions of homes across China as people get richer.
China's sprawling cities are also driving up power demand. Inner Mongolia now provides Beijing with 20% of its electricity, according to Jim Brock, an independent energy consultant in the Chinese capital.
Nearly two years ago, China's central government started cracking down on the unauthorized power plants because they feared a surplus of power. In Inner Mongolia, local officials ignored orders to stop building the Xingfeng plant, figuring they could always get retroactive approval, according to the official Xinhua news agency. But the death of the six workers in July 2005 set in motion the investigation that culminated in the public castigation of the provincial chief and the order to stop work on Xinfeng.
Some construction work on the plant continues. Workers interviewed at the site said the plant would be able to produce electricity next year. They declined to give their names.
Na Guiting, an official at Inner Mongolia Energy Generation Investment Co. Ltd., the plant's owner, said the company is eager to finish building and has reapplied for approval. "Mongolia still has a very serious power shortage. If Xinfeng would be approved, it could be generating in three or four months," the official said.
--Kersten Zhang contributed to this article.
Write to Shai Oster at shai.oster@dowjones.comSHAI OSTER
JUBAO VILLAGE, China -- On the edge of this dusty farming hamlet, the massive smokestack of the half-finished Xinfeng Power Plant looms as a monument to China's out-of-control demand for energy.
Unlike two other power plants nearby, Xinfeng isn't supposed to exist. China's electricity regulators never authorized the $362 million coal-burning plant. But in 2004, the provincial government here in northern China's Inner Mongolia ignored Beijing's call to slow down investment and started building the plant anyway, hoping to ensure enough juice for the region's supercharged industrialization by tapping its rich reservoirs of coal.
Inner Mongolia's disobedience might have escaped notice. But in July 2005, in the rush to finish the plant before regulators found out about it, the housing for a turbine collapsed, killing six workers. During the yearlong investigation that followed, the central government discovered that Inner Mongolia had illegally built about 10 power plants, or 8.6 gigawatts of electricity-generating capacity -- equal to about a 10th of the United Kingdom's total capacity.
The illegal plants have had unintended -- and detrimental -- consequences. By eschewing even basic environmental safeguards, they stand out as polluters even in an industry that is one of China's leading sources of emissions, officials say. They also have driven up the demand for and price of coal, the country's most abundant source of fuel. That, in turn, has spawned thousands of illegal coal mines that have contributed to more than 4,000 coal-mining deaths in China this year.
The illegal power plants show how China's economic transformation is outpacing Beijing's ability to manage it. Never before has a country with such a big population grown as rapidly as China. The country's economy has expanded an average 10% a year since the late 1970s. The process of economic modernization is happening twice as fast in China as it did in the U.S. or Japan, where it took half a century or more.
One fifth of the power plants in China are illegal, according to government estimates -- enough to light up all of the U.K. While the electricity they supply is essential to power China's growth, the uncontrolled manner in which they are multiplying, often under the protection of local authorities, poses a challenge to Beijing's authority and its grip on energy policy.
"It is impossible for our central government to go everywhere to see, when the small power plants start building," said Zhang Guobao, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top energy policy planner, in an interview.
The central government is likewise finding it hard to crack down on illegal coal mines. In past years it has shut down thousands of mines -- only to see thousands more spring up in their place. The primary reason: the soaring profits to be made from selling coal to China's power plants are a powerful temptation. Many regions have embraced coal mining to boost their growth rates, including Inner Mongolia, one of China's most coal-rich provinces.
Infuriated by the illegal Xinfeng power plant, central-government officials earlier this year demanded that the province's top leadership present self-criticisms before China's powerful State Council, or cabinet. Under China's Communist system, that's an unusually public form of rebuke, designed to send a message to others against defying Beijing's will.
Even so, construction continues today at the Xinfeng plant nearly a year after Beijing ordered it stopped. Officials at the company building the plant say they expect to get approval to complete it "sooner or later."
In China, more power plants almost invariably mean more coal consumption. The country has been unable to diversify away from coal, which is cheaper than alternative fuels, some of which are imported.
But China's coal consumption is costly in human and environmental terms. Amid the push to feed the country's power plants last year, 5,938 coal miners were killed in accidents, mostly in smaller, illegal mines. Such accidents are so commonplace here that only the larger ones rank as news.
Coal is one of the biggest pollution sources in China, which some experts think is on the verge of an environmental crisis. This year, the central government set a target of reducing the amount of energy the country consumes relative to its economic output. But the soaring demand for coal-fueled electricity has upended Beijing's efforts to rein in pollution.
"It will be very difficult to realize our targets of saving energy and reducing pollution," Ma Kai, China's top economic policy planner, said this fall.
The implications of China's mushrooming hunger for energy go far beyond its own borders. As incomes rise in China, energy use per person is starting to catch up with the richer West. The typical American consumes about eight metric tons of oil a year, or its equivalent in coal and other fuels. Japanese consume about half that sum. In China, per capita energy consumption now stands at just 1.2 metric tons.
It would require a doubling of world oil production -- an impossible feat -- for every Chinese to live the energy-intensive lifestyle of an American, as well as more coal than some believe China could ever dig up.
"We can't copy the big home and the big car" that so many Americans enjoy, said Zhou Dadi, a top researcher with the Energy Research Institute, a government-backed think tank. "It's just not doable."
China's current energy predicament is rooted in the decision it made three decades ago when it began to embrace a market economy. For the first 20 years of its transition, as China shifted from a mostly agrarian country to light industry, it was able to quadruple the size of its economy while only doubling its energy needs.
Throughout the 1990s, however, a new and faster phase of expansion quietly took hold as the government loosened restrictions on investment and the mobility of its citizens, accelerating China's industrialization and urbanization. Manufacturing accounted for a steadily greater share of the economy. Energy-intensive heavy industries boomed, from petrochemicals to auto production, aided by China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.
Low energy prices, made possible in part by government controls, encouraged consumers to use more. Coal consumption initially crept up slowly, to around 1.5 billion metric tons a year in the mid-1990s, from just under one billion metric tons a year a decade earlier. Last year, however, China consumed about 2.2 billion metric tons of coal, one-third of the world's total and more than any other country.
Beijing's efforts to reduce reliance on coal have largely failed. China has plenty of coal -- an estimated 114.5 billion metric tons of recoverable reserves. Only the U.S. and Russia have more. Natural gas, which burns more efficiently and causes far less pollution, has proved too expensive to compete effectively. Planned increases in nuclear-power production would fill only a fraction of China's energy demand. Even China's more-ambitious plans for hydropower power and wind farms won't seriously challenge coal's dominance.
Coal miners are on the front lines of the battle to meet China's energy needs. It is dangerous work. As with power plants, China's government has had great difficulty regulating coal mines. In the U.S., which produces about half as much coal as China, 47 miners have been killed so far this year, up from 22 last year. In China, the number of deaths has declined slightly this year, but it is still enormous: 4,236 dead so far.
The number of casualties goes up in the winter. More than 400 miners died in November alone. "In winter, demand goes up, the market prices go up, and the profit motive goes up," said Huang Yi, spokesman for the State Administration of Worker Safety, the agency that investigates mine accidents.
Smaller, often inefficient, and dangerous mines account for about a third of China's coal production. They are so important to meeting its energy needs that the central government recently delayed plans to improve safety by shuttering many of them.
Whole regions of China are pockmarked with tiny, illegal mines like the one in Wangyu in central China's gritty Shanxi province, where an accident in early November killed 34 miners. Four tons of demolition explosives illegally stored in a shaft caught fire and destroyed the small mine, according to government safety officials. The dead, who had just started the night shift, were mostly from the same village some 250 miles away.
Wang Chenliang, from Sichuan province, had just ended his shift when the explosion occurred. He rushed back to help with rescue efforts. He and others pulled survivors from the wreckage and pumped air into the mine to aid anyone who was trapped but still alive.
"This work is tiring and dangerous," Mr. Wang said a few days after the accident, only moments before police detained a journalist attempting to interview survivors. Like others, he got his job through introductions from fellow villagers. "We came here to earn money. The money here is much higher than back home in Sichuan."
The mine's safety certificate and production permit had both expired, according to central-government officials. But the local government was protecting it, they said, because it held a financial interest in the mine.
That sort of corruption is common. Last year, the central government found that more than 4,500 government officials illegally held stakes in coal mines and frequently covered up safety violations. Many of these mines lack basic safety equipment. Workers scrabble down narrow pits, where the most modern tools may be the sticks of dynamite used to dislodge the coal. At the accident site in Wangyu, there was no rescue equipment on hand, another common problem.
Over the past few years, provincial officials in Inner Mongolia have decided to build power plants and encourage heavy industry to relocate to the region to take advantage of its coal resources. The strategy has paid off in economic terms.
Last year, the province's economy grew 21.6%, roughly double the national rate. In 2004, it grew 19.4%. Industrial output has grown an average 30% a year over the past four years. Such unbridled growth caught China's central government off guard.
In 2003 and 2004, massive power shortages in the south led to rolling blackouts. Local authorities across China decided to build power plants, often illegally, to keep their local economies humming. Around that time, officials in Inner Mongolia approved a plan to build the Xinfeng Power Plant in the small town of Fengzhen, in a bid to attract more factories.
"Inner Mongolia has a lot of coal. Other parts of China need the electricity. Of course Inner Mongolia should take advantage of its natural resources," said Yan Keji, a construction worker at one of the three power plants near Jubao.
It isn't just heavy industry that needs power. China's consumers are using more, too. Mr. Yan's hometown in the mountains of Hunan didn't have electricity until 1990. At first, his house had one light bulb. Now, the money he earns from construction has paid for a television, washing machine, refrigerator and air conditioning, a pattern repeated in millions of homes across China as people get richer.
China's sprawling cities are also driving up power demand. Inner Mongolia now provides Beijing with 20% of its electricity, according to Jim Brock, an independent energy consultant in the Chinese capital.
Nearly two years ago, China's central government started cracking down on the unauthorized power plants because they feared a surplus of power. In Inner Mongolia, local officials ignored orders to stop building the Xingfeng plant, figuring they could always get retroactive approval, according to the official Xinhua news agency. But the death of the six workers in July 2005 set in motion the investigation that culminated in the public castigation of the provincial chief and the order to stop work on Xinfeng.
Some construction work on the plant continues. Workers interviewed at the site said the plant would be able to produce electricity next year. They declined to give their names.
Na Guiting, an official at Inner Mongolia Energy Generation Investment Co. Ltd., the plant's owner, said the company is eager to finish building and has reapplied for approval. "Mongolia still has a very serious power shortage. If Xinfeng would be approved, it could be generating in three or four months," the official said.
--Kersten Zhang contributed to this article.
Write to Shai Oster at shai.oster@dowjones.com
Monday, December 25, 2006
The Liberal Scare Du Jour on Global Warming
Sealing the Fate of Antarctica
By Patrick J. Michaels
Published 12/20/2006 12:07:02 AM
The scare du jour on global warming is a massive inundation of our coast caused by rapid loss of ice from Antarctica. It's a core point in Al Gore's science fiction movie, and it continues to be thumped by doomsayers around the world, in the echo chamber of the alarmist media. It's also a bunch of hooey.If you could take the boredom, you could have read hundreds of news stories on this since An Inconvenient Truth debuted on May 25. But you'll find very little mention of a paper that appeared a mere six weeks later, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which should have stopped the whole show cold. The work is by Brenda Hall from the University of Maine and several co-authors.First, Gore's science fiction. Due to the warming of the surrounding ocean, big ice-shelves begin to crack off and float away. Because that ice is floating, it doesn't raise sea level a bit. But then the ice cracks all the way back to where it is grounded on the ocean floor. That stuff isn't floating and the ocean rises dramatically, some twenty feet in a hundred years. Much of Manhattan, the movie suggests, is under water, along with just about every other coastal city.Now, the truth. The notion that this is going to happen soon has just been fatally harpooned by giant Elephant Seals (Mirounga leonine). They generally hang out a long distance form Antarctica. Most of their breeding rookeries are a good 2,000 miles away on islands in the open ocean, where they feed. Most of the Antarctic coast is hemmed by huge ice shelves that prevent them from finding food.But that wasn't always the case. According to Hall's paper, a large area of the Antarctic coast was ice-free between 1,100 and 2,300 years ago. Elephant seals established multiple rookeries on the continent. Temperatures had to be much warmer than they are today, for at least 1,200 years, and yet there was no disintegration of the large ice shelves. Hall et al. then noted another similar period, almost twice as long, from 4,000 to 6,000 years ago.The warm millennium ended as the world's temperature descended from what scientists call the "Medieval Warm Period" into the "Little Ice Age." Antarctica has yet to fully recover from this last period, as temperatures averaged across the continent actually showed a net cooling in the last three decades.Hall studied ancient Antarctic beaches, which could only contain relics of large numbers of elephant seals if there were open water. Others have examined extinct penguin rookeries and found that those happily footed birds tended to be absent when the seals were present. That's because penguins feed along the edges of sea-ice, so if there isn't any, there aren't any birds.Of course this also means, even as temperatures warm to degrees seen for more than half of the last six millennia, that penguins will be displaced from their current rookeries. The horror of natural climate variability! Cute little penguins driven from their homes by cruel Mother Nature!!Hall et al. give a quantitative perspective on today's climate. Current thinking is that the Antarctic ice shelves become susceptible to rapid breakup when the January (Summer) temperature averages about -1.5 degrees Celsius But the seals only thrive, according to the paper, "when the mean January temperature exceeds 0 [degrees] C, usually by considerable margins."So Hall and her colleagues conclude that "January temperatures...surpassed the -1.5 [degrees] C threshold during two long periods at ~1,000-2,300 and 4,000-6,000 years b.p. [before present]."George Denton, one of Hall's University of Maine colleagues and coauthors, summed it up in the school's U Maine Today Magazine: "Through her discovery of elephant seal remains over a widespread area where they do not exist today, she [Hall] shows evidence not only that a warming occurred, but that the Ross Ice Shelf survived that event. It's important because it speaks to the staying capacity of the ice shelf in the face of global warming."Stories about an imminent collapse of Antarctic ice shelves can go back to the science fiction shelves, where they belonged all along.For that matter, so can this whole apocalyptic myth. If Antarctic ice remained stable for thousands of years with temperatures considerably warmer than they are today, how in the world are we going to provoke a catastrophe? Among other things, we will still have to be powering our society on fossil fuels in the year 4,100.Patrick J. Michaels is Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at the Cato Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.
By Patrick J. Michaels
Published 12/20/2006 12:07:02 AM
The scare du jour on global warming is a massive inundation of our coast caused by rapid loss of ice from Antarctica. It's a core point in Al Gore's science fiction movie, and it continues to be thumped by doomsayers around the world, in the echo chamber of the alarmist media. It's also a bunch of hooey.If you could take the boredom, you could have read hundreds of news stories on this since An Inconvenient Truth debuted on May 25. But you'll find very little mention of a paper that appeared a mere six weeks later, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which should have stopped the whole show cold. The work is by Brenda Hall from the University of Maine and several co-authors.First, Gore's science fiction. Due to the warming of the surrounding ocean, big ice-shelves begin to crack off and float away. Because that ice is floating, it doesn't raise sea level a bit. But then the ice cracks all the way back to where it is grounded on the ocean floor. That stuff isn't floating and the ocean rises dramatically, some twenty feet in a hundred years. Much of Manhattan, the movie suggests, is under water, along with just about every other coastal city.Now, the truth. The notion that this is going to happen soon has just been fatally harpooned by giant Elephant Seals (Mirounga leonine). They generally hang out a long distance form Antarctica. Most of their breeding rookeries are a good 2,000 miles away on islands in the open ocean, where they feed. Most of the Antarctic coast is hemmed by huge ice shelves that prevent them from finding food.But that wasn't always the case. According to Hall's paper, a large area of the Antarctic coast was ice-free between 1,100 and 2,300 years ago. Elephant seals established multiple rookeries on the continent. Temperatures had to be much warmer than they are today, for at least 1,200 years, and yet there was no disintegration of the large ice shelves. Hall et al. then noted another similar period, almost twice as long, from 4,000 to 6,000 years ago.The warm millennium ended as the world's temperature descended from what scientists call the "Medieval Warm Period" into the "Little Ice Age." Antarctica has yet to fully recover from this last period, as temperatures averaged across the continent actually showed a net cooling in the last three decades.Hall studied ancient Antarctic beaches, which could only contain relics of large numbers of elephant seals if there were open water. Others have examined extinct penguin rookeries and found that those happily footed birds tended to be absent when the seals were present. That's because penguins feed along the edges of sea-ice, so if there isn't any, there aren't any birds.Of course this also means, even as temperatures warm to degrees seen for more than half of the last six millennia, that penguins will be displaced from their current rookeries. The horror of natural climate variability! Cute little penguins driven from their homes by cruel Mother Nature!!Hall et al. give a quantitative perspective on today's climate. Current thinking is that the Antarctic ice shelves become susceptible to rapid breakup when the January (Summer) temperature averages about -1.5 degrees Celsius But the seals only thrive, according to the paper, "when the mean January temperature exceeds 0 [degrees] C, usually by considerable margins."So Hall and her colleagues conclude that "January temperatures...surpassed the -1.5 [degrees] C threshold during two long periods at ~1,000-2,300 and 4,000-6,000 years b.p. [before present]."George Denton, one of Hall's University of Maine colleagues and coauthors, summed it up in the school's U Maine Today Magazine: "Through her discovery of elephant seal remains over a widespread area where they do not exist today, she [Hall] shows evidence not only that a warming occurred, but that the Ross Ice Shelf survived that event. It's important because it speaks to the staying capacity of the ice shelf in the face of global warming."Stories about an imminent collapse of Antarctic ice shelves can go back to the science fiction shelves, where they belonged all along.For that matter, so can this whole apocalyptic myth. If Antarctic ice remained stable for thousands of years with temperatures considerably warmer than they are today, how in the world are we going to provoke a catastrophe? Among other things, we will still have to be powering our society on fossil fuels in the year 4,100.Patrick J. Michaels is Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at the Cato Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Roanoke Times and O'Reilly trade barbs.
O'Reilly reaction ignites slew of responses
Bill O'Reilly fired back Tuesday at an editorial by Dan Radmacher of The Roanoke Times.
By Erinn Hutkin 981-3138
Interviews with three local TV stations. Calls from readers. E-mails from everywhere -- and a voicemail message from a friend joking he's a "liberal loon."
It was more reaction than Roanoke Times Editorial Page Editor Dan Radmacher expected from his Sunday column on the Horizon section front page.
The piece attacked the "'War on Christmas' nonsense" and cited TV commentator Bill O'Reilly as pushing it.
On Tuesday -- on radio and on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor," -- the conservative host fired back.
By Wednesday, the war of words between the local editorial writer and the national name was everywhere -- on TV, Web sites and radio news. Readers were weighing in. And one local news anchor termed it "David versus Goliath."
The reaction was strange, Radmacher admitted Wednesday. When he wrote his column he never expected to reach O'Reilly's radar.
"I could see jumping onto something in The New York Times, but to make a big deal of a relatively small newspaper seems counterproductive," Radmacher said. "I had no idea he (O'Reilly) would be that easy to provoke."
One day after his column ran, Radmacher, 42, said an O'Reilly assistant called him, as well as newspaper editor Mike Riley, Publisher Wendy Zomparelli and Landmark Communications Inc., which owns The Roanoke Times.
Tipped off that his column might be mentioned, Radmacher listened to O'Reilly's radio broadcast Tuesday and watched his nighttime show, "The O'Reilly Factor."
He was not alone.
By 11 p.m. Tuesday, WDBJ-TV (Channel 7) was reporting the story.
David Seidel, assignment editor for WDBJ, said the fact Roanoke was being mentioned nationally led the station to pick up the story.
"Anytime an issue locally ... gets that kind of national attention, we think it's worth noting," he said.
The spat also made news on WSLS (Channel 10), ABC 13 (WSET-TV) and radio station WFIR-AM. WDBJ's and WFIR's Web site also linked to O'Reilly's show on Fox News.
Overnight e-mails from listeners asking, "What did O'Reilly say?" prompted WFIR to air the story in the morning and afternoon, said Program Director Jim Murphy.
During its Wednesday morning news meeting, said Channel 13 assistant news director/assignment editor Emmett Strode, reaction consisted of "can you believe this," prompting the news agency to pursue the story.
"It's one of those, 'What's the big stink about?' " Strode said.
Meanwhile, a Roanoke Times message board was full of reaction Wednesday, some taking Radmacher's side, some supporting O'Reilly,
"I watched Bill O'Reilly tear you and your tiny little paper to pieces last night and it was great. You may slam Bill locally but he blasted you ... nationally, excuse me, internationally," one person wrote.
Other messages were more supportive.
"Great piece," one message read. "It is sad that so many get their world view from this aggressive, obnoxious individual on a daily basis."
After O'Reilly reacted, Radmacher said he considered writing something else in defense, but decided to "let it go."
After all, he admitted, this may not be the first time he's been called a loon. It's just the first time its happened on national TV.
Bill O'Reilly fired back Tuesday at an editorial by Dan Radmacher of The Roanoke Times.
By Erinn Hutkin 981-3138
Interviews with three local TV stations. Calls from readers. E-mails from everywhere -- and a voicemail message from a friend joking he's a "liberal loon."
It was more reaction than Roanoke Times Editorial Page Editor Dan Radmacher expected from his Sunday column on the Horizon section front page.
The piece attacked the "'War on Christmas' nonsense" and cited TV commentator Bill O'Reilly as pushing it.
On Tuesday -- on radio and on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor," -- the conservative host fired back.
By Wednesday, the war of words between the local editorial writer and the national name was everywhere -- on TV, Web sites and radio news. Readers were weighing in. And one local news anchor termed it "David versus Goliath."
The reaction was strange, Radmacher admitted Wednesday. When he wrote his column he never expected to reach O'Reilly's radar.
"I could see jumping onto something in The New York Times, but to make a big deal of a relatively small newspaper seems counterproductive," Radmacher said. "I had no idea he (O'Reilly) would be that easy to provoke."
One day after his column ran, Radmacher, 42, said an O'Reilly assistant called him, as well as newspaper editor Mike Riley, Publisher Wendy Zomparelli and Landmark Communications Inc., which owns The Roanoke Times.
Tipped off that his column might be mentioned, Radmacher listened to O'Reilly's radio broadcast Tuesday and watched his nighttime show, "The O'Reilly Factor."
He was not alone.
By 11 p.m. Tuesday, WDBJ-TV (Channel 7) was reporting the story.
David Seidel, assignment editor for WDBJ, said the fact Roanoke was being mentioned nationally led the station to pick up the story.
"Anytime an issue locally ... gets that kind of national attention, we think it's worth noting," he said.
The spat also made news on WSLS (Channel 10), ABC 13 (WSET-TV) and radio station WFIR-AM. WDBJ's and WFIR's Web site also linked to O'Reilly's show on Fox News.
Overnight e-mails from listeners asking, "What did O'Reilly say?" prompted WFIR to air the story in the morning and afternoon, said Program Director Jim Murphy.
During its Wednesday morning news meeting, said Channel 13 assistant news director/assignment editor Emmett Strode, reaction consisted of "can you believe this," prompting the news agency to pursue the story.
"It's one of those, 'What's the big stink about?' " Strode said.
Meanwhile, a Roanoke Times message board was full of reaction Wednesday, some taking Radmacher's side, some supporting O'Reilly,
"I watched Bill O'Reilly tear you and your tiny little paper to pieces last night and it was great. You may slam Bill locally but he blasted you ... nationally, excuse me, internationally," one person wrote.
Other messages were more supportive.
"Great piece," one message read. "It is sad that so many get their world view from this aggressive, obnoxious individual on a daily basis."
After O'Reilly reacted, Radmacher said he considered writing something else in defense, but decided to "let it go."
After all, he admitted, this may not be the first time he's been called a loon. It's just the first time its happened on national TV.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Society and its appetite for natural resources
END OF INGENUITY?
Malthusians may have last laugh. Our appetite for energy is running into a wall: Earth's finite resources
By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON
Maybe Malthus was on to something, after all.
First, some background: Twenty-six years ago, in one of the most famous wagers in the history of science, Paul Ehrlich, John Harte and John P. Holdren bet Julian Simon that the prices of five key metals would rise in the next decade. Ehrlich and his colleagues, all environmental scientists, believed that humankind's growing population and appetite for natural resources would eventually drive the metals' costs up. Simon, a professor of business administration, thought that human innovation would drive costs down.
Ten years later, Ehrlich and his colleagues sent Simon a check for $576.07 — an amount representing the decline in the metals' prices after accounting for inflation. To many, the bet's outcome refuted Malthusian arguments that human population growth and resource consumption — and economic growth more generally — would run headlong into the limits of a finite planet. Human inventiveness, stimulated by modern markets, would always trump scarcity.
Indeed, the 1990s seemed to confirm this wisdom. Energy and commodity prices collapsed; ideas (not physical capital or material resources) were the new source of wealth, and local air and water got cleaner — at least in rich countries.
But today, it seems, Ehrlich and his colleagues may have the last (grim) laugh. The debate about limits to growth is coming back with a vengeance. The world's supply of cheap energy is tightening, and humankind's enormous output of greenhouse gases is disrupting the Earth's climate. Together, these two constraints could eventually hobble global economic growth and cap the size of the global economy.
The most important resource to consider in this situation is energy, because it is our economy's "master resource" — the one ingredient essential for every economic activity. Sure, the price of a barrel of oil has dropped sharply from its peak of $78 last summer, but that's probably just a fluctuation in a longer upward trend in the cost of oil — and of energy more generally. In any case, the day-to-day price of oil isn't a particularly good indicator of changes in energy's underlying cost, because it's influenced by everything from Middle East politics to fears of hurricanes.
A better measure of the cost of oil, or any energy source, is the amount of energy required to produce it. Just as we evaluate a financial investment by comparing the size of the return with the size of the original expenditure, we can evaluate any project that generates energy by dividing the amount of energy the project produces by the amount it consumes.
Economists and physicists call this quantity the "energy return on investment" or E.R.O.I. For a modern coal mine, for instance, we divide the useful energy in the coal that the mine produces by the total of all the energy needed to dig the coal from the ground and prepare it for burning — including the energy in the diesel fuel that powers the jackhammers, shovels and off-road dump trucks, the energy in the electricity that runs the machines that crush and sort the coal, as well as all the energy needed to build and maintain these machines.
As the average E.R.O.I. of an economy's energy sources drops toward 1 to 1, an ever-larger fraction of the economy's wealth must go to finding and producing energy. This means less wealth is left over for everything else that needs to be done, from building houses to moving around information to educating children. The energy return on investment for conventional oil, which provides about 40 percent of the world's commercial energy and more than 95 percent of America's transportation energy, has been falling for decades. The trend is most advanced in U.S. production, where petroleum resources have been exploited the longest and drillers have been forced to look for ever-smaller and ever-deeper pools of oil.
Cutler Cleveland, an energy scientist at Boston University who helped developed the concept of E.R.O.I. two decades ago, calculates that from the early 1970s to today the return on investment of oil and natural gas extraction in the United States fell from about 25 to 1 to about 15 to 1.
This basic trend can be seen around the globe with many energy sources. We've most likely already found and tapped the biggest, most accessible and highest-E.R.O.I. oil and gas fields, just as we've already exploited the best rivers for hydropower. Now, as we're extracting new oil and gas in more extreme environments — in deep water far offshore, for example — and as we're turning to energy alternatives like nuclear power and converting tar sands to gasoline, we're spending steadily more energy to get energy.
For example, the tar sands of Alberta, likely to be a prime energy source for the United States in the future, have an E.R.O.I. of around 4 to 1, because a huge amount of energy (mainly from natural gas) is needed to convert the sands' raw bitumen into useable oil.
Having to search farther and longer for our resources isn't the only new hurdle we face. Climate change could also constrain growth. A steady stream of evidence now indicates that the planet is warming quickly and that the economic impact on agriculture, our built environment, ecosystems and human health could, in time, be very large. For instance, a report prepared for the British government by Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank, calculated that without restraints on greenhouse gas emissions, by 2100 the annual worldwide costs of damage from climate change could reach 20 percent of global economic output.
Humankind's energy and climate problems are intimately connected. Petroleum's falling energy return on investment will encourage many economies to burn more coal (which in many parts of the world still has a relatively good E.R.O.I.), but coal emits far more greenhouse-inducing carbon dioxide for every unit of useful energy obtained than other energy sources. Also, many potential solutions to climate change — like moving water to newly arid regions or building dikes and relocating communities along vulnerable coastlines — will require huge amounts of energy.
Without a doubt, mankind can find ways to push back these constraints on global growth with market-driven innovation on energy supply, efficient use of energy and pollution cleanup. But we probably can't push them back indefinitely, because our species' capacity to innovate, and to deliver the fruits of that innovation when and where they're needed, isn't infinite.
Sometimes even the best scientific minds can't crack a technical problem quickly (take, for instance, the painfully slow evolution of battery technology in recent decades), sometimes market prices give entrepreneurs poor price signals (gasoline today is still far too cheap to encourage quick innovation in fuel-efficient vehicles) and, most important, sometimes there just isn't the political will to back the institutional and technological changes needed.
We can see glaring examples of such failures of innovation even in the United States — home to the world's most dynamic economy.
Despite decades of increasingly dire warnings about the risks of dependence on foreign energy, the country now imports two-thirds of its oil; and during the last 20 years, despite increasingly clear scientific evidence regarding the dangers of climate change, the country's output of carbon dioxide has increased by a fifth.
As the price of energy rises and as the planet gets hotter, we need significantly higher investment in innovation throughout society, from governments and corporations to universities. Perhaps the most urgent step, if humankind is going to return to coal as its major energy source, is to figure out ways of safely disposing of coal's harmful carbon dioxide — probably underground.
But in the larger sense, we really need to start thinking hard about how our societies — especially those that are already very rich — can maintain their social and political stability, and satisfy the aspirations of their citizens, when we can no longer count on endless economic growth.
Homer-Dixon, director of the Trudeau Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of "The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization."
Malthusians may have last laugh. Our appetite for energy is running into a wall: Earth's finite resources
By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON
Maybe Malthus was on to something, after all.
First, some background: Twenty-six years ago, in one of the most famous wagers in the history of science, Paul Ehrlich, John Harte and John P. Holdren bet Julian Simon that the prices of five key metals would rise in the next decade. Ehrlich and his colleagues, all environmental scientists, believed that humankind's growing population and appetite for natural resources would eventually drive the metals' costs up. Simon, a professor of business administration, thought that human innovation would drive costs down.
Ten years later, Ehrlich and his colleagues sent Simon a check for $576.07 — an amount representing the decline in the metals' prices after accounting for inflation. To many, the bet's outcome refuted Malthusian arguments that human population growth and resource consumption — and economic growth more generally — would run headlong into the limits of a finite planet. Human inventiveness, stimulated by modern markets, would always trump scarcity.
Indeed, the 1990s seemed to confirm this wisdom. Energy and commodity prices collapsed; ideas (not physical capital or material resources) were the new source of wealth, and local air and water got cleaner — at least in rich countries.
But today, it seems, Ehrlich and his colleagues may have the last (grim) laugh. The debate about limits to growth is coming back with a vengeance. The world's supply of cheap energy is tightening, and humankind's enormous output of greenhouse gases is disrupting the Earth's climate. Together, these two constraints could eventually hobble global economic growth and cap the size of the global economy.
The most important resource to consider in this situation is energy, because it is our economy's "master resource" — the one ingredient essential for every economic activity. Sure, the price of a barrel of oil has dropped sharply from its peak of $78 last summer, but that's probably just a fluctuation in a longer upward trend in the cost of oil — and of energy more generally. In any case, the day-to-day price of oil isn't a particularly good indicator of changes in energy's underlying cost, because it's influenced by everything from Middle East politics to fears of hurricanes.
A better measure of the cost of oil, or any energy source, is the amount of energy required to produce it. Just as we evaluate a financial investment by comparing the size of the return with the size of the original expenditure, we can evaluate any project that generates energy by dividing the amount of energy the project produces by the amount it consumes.
Economists and physicists call this quantity the "energy return on investment" or E.R.O.I. For a modern coal mine, for instance, we divide the useful energy in the coal that the mine produces by the total of all the energy needed to dig the coal from the ground and prepare it for burning — including the energy in the diesel fuel that powers the jackhammers, shovels and off-road dump trucks, the energy in the electricity that runs the machines that crush and sort the coal, as well as all the energy needed to build and maintain these machines.
As the average E.R.O.I. of an economy's energy sources drops toward 1 to 1, an ever-larger fraction of the economy's wealth must go to finding and producing energy. This means less wealth is left over for everything else that needs to be done, from building houses to moving around information to educating children. The energy return on investment for conventional oil, which provides about 40 percent of the world's commercial energy and more than 95 percent of America's transportation energy, has been falling for decades. The trend is most advanced in U.S. production, where petroleum resources have been exploited the longest and drillers have been forced to look for ever-smaller and ever-deeper pools of oil.
Cutler Cleveland, an energy scientist at Boston University who helped developed the concept of E.R.O.I. two decades ago, calculates that from the early 1970s to today the return on investment of oil and natural gas extraction in the United States fell from about 25 to 1 to about 15 to 1.
This basic trend can be seen around the globe with many energy sources. We've most likely already found and tapped the biggest, most accessible and highest-E.R.O.I. oil and gas fields, just as we've already exploited the best rivers for hydropower. Now, as we're extracting new oil and gas in more extreme environments — in deep water far offshore, for example — and as we're turning to energy alternatives like nuclear power and converting tar sands to gasoline, we're spending steadily more energy to get energy.
For example, the tar sands of Alberta, likely to be a prime energy source for the United States in the future, have an E.R.O.I. of around 4 to 1, because a huge amount of energy (mainly from natural gas) is needed to convert the sands' raw bitumen into useable oil.
Having to search farther and longer for our resources isn't the only new hurdle we face. Climate change could also constrain growth. A steady stream of evidence now indicates that the planet is warming quickly and that the economic impact on agriculture, our built environment, ecosystems and human health could, in time, be very large. For instance, a report prepared for the British government by Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank, calculated that without restraints on greenhouse gas emissions, by 2100 the annual worldwide costs of damage from climate change could reach 20 percent of global economic output.
Humankind's energy and climate problems are intimately connected. Petroleum's falling energy return on investment will encourage many economies to burn more coal (which in many parts of the world still has a relatively good E.R.O.I.), but coal emits far more greenhouse-inducing carbon dioxide for every unit of useful energy obtained than other energy sources. Also, many potential solutions to climate change — like moving water to newly arid regions or building dikes and relocating communities along vulnerable coastlines — will require huge amounts of energy.
Without a doubt, mankind can find ways to push back these constraints on global growth with market-driven innovation on energy supply, efficient use of energy and pollution cleanup. But we probably can't push them back indefinitely, because our species' capacity to innovate, and to deliver the fruits of that innovation when and where they're needed, isn't infinite.
Sometimes even the best scientific minds can't crack a technical problem quickly (take, for instance, the painfully slow evolution of battery technology in recent decades), sometimes market prices give entrepreneurs poor price signals (gasoline today is still far too cheap to encourage quick innovation in fuel-efficient vehicles) and, most important, sometimes there just isn't the political will to back the institutional and technological changes needed.
We can see glaring examples of such failures of innovation even in the United States — home to the world's most dynamic economy.
Despite decades of increasingly dire warnings about the risks of dependence on foreign energy, the country now imports two-thirds of its oil; and during the last 20 years, despite increasingly clear scientific evidence regarding the dangers of climate change, the country's output of carbon dioxide has increased by a fifth.
As the price of energy rises and as the planet gets hotter, we need significantly higher investment in innovation throughout society, from governments and corporations to universities. Perhaps the most urgent step, if humankind is going to return to coal as its major energy source, is to figure out ways of safely disposing of coal's harmful carbon dioxide — probably underground.
But in the larger sense, we really need to start thinking hard about how our societies — especially those that are already very rich — can maintain their social and political stability, and satisfy the aspirations of their citizens, when we can no longer count on endless economic growth.
Homer-Dixon, director of the Trudeau Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of "The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization."
Ideas for creating power
Energy Special
Aug. 31, 1998, 11:26PM
Energetic thinkers have lots of ideas for creating power
By MICHAEL DAVISCopyright 1998 Houston Chronicle
Imagine making cheap fuel from lawn clippings, driving a car that could go thousands of miles without refueling, or harvesting frozen natural gas from the ocean floor.
While some of these ideas may sound a little far out, they are all the subject of funded research projects seeking the next breakthrough in energy technology.
Most are not yet of practical use, but each has the potential to significantly change where we get our energy and how we use it.
"The most precious thing you can buy in energy policy is time," said Amory Lovins, director of research at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colo. "The better the technologies get on the supply or demand side, the more time you have to get better still."
· · ·
Roger Sassen, has spent the last 14 years chasing one of the most obscure, but abundant forms of energy on Earth.
Sassen, the deputy director of the geochemical & environmental research group at Texas A&M University, is considered the leading authority on methane hydrates -- huge deposits of natural gas mixed with water and frozen on the ocean floor.
First discovered in 1810, methane hydrates originate as natural gas seeping up through sediments on the ocean floor. High pressure and icy temperatures cause the gas to mix with the water to form frozen outcroppings.
Methane hydrates are nothing new. For years, they have formed naturally in gas pipelines that run through cold, deep water. In pipelines, they are considered a nuisance because they clog up the lines and have to be cleaned out.
Those on the ocean floor are a potential source of natural gas. The problem is that methane hydrates -- unlike traditional gas reserves, which are confined and under pressure -- represent free gas that vaporizes as soon as it reaches the atmosphere. Before they can be commercially produced, they must be contained and transported.
Sassen believes the hydrates could be harvested in their natural environment, packaged in a blimp-like container and towed to processing plants in shallow waters.
The payoff for developing a commercial method to produce methane hydrates could be huge. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates methane hydrate reserves in U.S. waters alone could be as high as 676,000 trillion cubic feet.
Two areas, each about the size of Rhode Island, already have been mapped off the East Coast. They alone are estimated to contain 1,300 trillion cubic feet of methane, or about 70 times annual U.S. gas consumption, according to the Geological Survey.
"Ten years ago, no one really cared about this, but now there has been enough information come out about the volume of energy in gas hydrates that it has become very difficult to ignore," Sassen said. As energy consumption increases and prices rise, Sassen believes, companies will pump more money into developing methods for producing hydrates.
The hydrates are found throughout the world's waters, but the Gulf of Mexico appears to be one of the areas where they are concentrated enough to have commercial production potential.
"It is my feeling that the Gulf of Mexico will be one of the first places where they are commercially exploited," Sassen said. "The huge infrastructure of deepwater facilities and pipelines there is going to become scrap metal in 30 to 40 years unless there is something to put through that system."
Shell Oil Co. is among those funding methane hydrate research. Such research makes sense to the Houston company since the hydrates typically are found in deep water, where Shell is one of the biggest players.
"If we can solve the problem of how to economically find them and produce them, there is a tremendous resource there," said Charlie Williams, manager of well systems for Shell E&P Technology Co.
In addition to the technological hurdles in producing the fuel, there are legal problems to be ironed out -- primarily the question of whether hydrates would be covered under mineral leases struck with state or federal governments.
"There are a lot of problems to be worked out, but it's easier than going to Mars," Sassen said.
· · ·
Mike Robinson's research into creating a fuel and refinery feedstock from lawn clippings and other plant material seems like Oil Patch alchemy.
Robinson, head of chemistry studies at the University of Texas at Permian Basin in Odessa, has been working on his process for about four years. He is at the end of a three-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Using plant material, he has successfully produced a fuel similar to gasoline or diesel.
His process essentially recreates in a laboratory setting the process that takes millions of years in nature: the breakdown of plants into oil and gas. Robinson is intentionally vague when discussing his process because of the proprietary nature of his research.
"We do it in boiling water in an hour," Robinson said. "There are some catalysts and other things that make it go."
The light fuel that Robinson produces floats to the top of the water, where the honey-colored liquid is skimmed off. "It would have about a 90 octane rating," he said.
The process already is covered by one patent, another is in the approval process and another application is being drafted.
"As we have learned more about it, there are all kinds of possibilities," Robinson said. "We can tailor it and design it to make more than just a cheap fuel. We think solvents and chemicals should be the first items produced by the process because of the oil glut and because the profit margin would be better."
While oil companies have not supported Robinson's research, he said it has caught the attention of agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland Co., which is interested in using the process to produce specialty chemicals.
· · ·
All of the major oil companies -- along with several independent firms -- are working on an economically feasible way to turn natural gas into a liquid fuel similar to diesel.
Royal Dutch/Shell and Sasol, the South African oil company, already have built small gas-to-liquids plants, but they are considered more experiments than breakthroughs.
The process, or some form of it, has been around since 1923, when it was discovered by two German scientists, Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch. During World War II, it was used to produce liquid fuel from synthetic gas produced from coal.
Syntroleum Corp. of Tulsa, Okla., holds a license for a proprietary process for converting natural gas into synthetic crude oil. It's working on developing two plants using its process.
One would be an 8,000-barrel-per-day gas-to-liquids plant in Wyoming with the help of Enron Capital & Trade Resources. That plant would convert natural gas into synthetic lubricants, drilling fluids and liquid parafins. Groundbreaking for the plant is expected in the second quarter of 1999, and it is expected to begin operation in late 2001.
Syntroleum also has struck a deal with Texaco and Brown & Root for the construction of a gas-to-liquids plant in an undetermined location outside of the United States. It was originally expected to be online in the third quarter of 1999, but it will not be in operation that soon since a site has not been chosen, said Paul Weeditz, Texaco spokesman in Houston.
"We are continuing to narrow down the list of possible sites," he said. "Before we proceed, we want to make sure we have the best configuration possible. All I can say now is: Stay tuned."
Exxon has some 400 patents on its natural gas process, although it has not built a commercial production facility yet, said Ed Burwell, company spokesman in Dallas.
"We are still trying to negotiate a project in Qatar," he said. The plant Exxon has said it would like to build in Qatar would convert 500 million cubic feet of gas per day into 50,000 barrels of middle distillates, which include kerosene, light and heavy diesel oil and heating oil.
Shell, too, has a process for converting natural gas to liquids, said Charlie Williams, manager of well systems for Shell E&P Technology Co. Shell has been working on its gas-to-liquids process since the early 1970s.
The economic incentive for getting this technology into the field is to tap vast supplies of "stranded gas," natural gas reservoirs that have no pipeline connections in place. If such gas could be converted to liquid, it could be moved by ship or through an existing liquids pipeline.
Syntroleum claims it has solved the problem of mobility with a design that allows the natural gas processing hardware to be mounted on a barge or ship so the refinery can literally go to the reserves. But it has yet to build one of its plants on a barge and test it offshore, said John Ford, spokesman for the company.
· · ·
Unlike other emerging energy technologies, fuel cells may soon work their way into consumer products.
They are a variation on the high school chemistry experiment in which electricity is used to separate water into its constituents of hydrogen and oxygen. Fuel cells do the reverse: They combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity with heat and water as the only by-products.
Fuel cells range in size from the dimensions of a cinderblock to those of a small car.
In August, Shell International Oil Products and a subsidiary of Daimler-Benz struck a deal to jointly research the use of fuel cells for a new generation of cars.
Daimler-Benz, Mercedes-Benz's parent company, previously had said that it was spending $145 million to buy a stake in a company named Ballard Power Systems, which is developing fuel-cell technology for a broad range of applications, from powering cars to generating electricity on a large scale. Ford Motor Co. is a partner in that deal.
Lovins with the Rocky Mountain Institute predicts a fuel-cell powered car from a major automaker will come on the market by 2000 -- 10 years ahead of expectations.
Cars powered by fuel cells could travel as much as 5,000 miles on one charge of hydrogen before requiring refueling.
Fuel cells first came to prominence when they were used to generate electricity on space flights, but there are hundreds of other applications -- powering everything from submarines to laptop computers.
"It is the most reliable power source we know," Lovins said. "And it is about to get very cheap; cheaper than an internal combustion engine."
A prototype house in Latham, N.Y. is now running on a fuel cell supplied by Plug Power, based in Latham. The company predicts it will have commercial systems available by 2000 at a cost of about $5,000.
Other technologies that have attracted research funding and are aimed more toward traditional energy exploration and production include:
· A project to study drilling wells with lasers, using the "Star Wars" technology developed to take out missiles from space.
Ramona Graves, a professor of petroleum engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, presented her preliminary research at this year's Offshore Technology Conference. She and her partners in the project are seeking additional funding. So far, they have received about $2 million from the Gas Research Institute.
She and her research partner, Darien O'Brien, recently returned from Russia, where they spoke with scientists on using Russian laser technology.
"Additional funding looks promising," Graves said.
· A project from Baker Oil Tools and the Department of Energy to develop downhole monitors that use production pipe like an antenna to relay well data back to the surface.
The system would monitor pressure, temperature and other conditions in a well. Such information is crucial to operators when making decisions on how to optimize production and when to conduct what can be an expensive workover.
The new monitors would replace more-expensive and less-reliable systems, with wires running up the well to the surface.
The system is considered a breakthough because it would significantly reduce the hardware and installation costs of existing temperature/pressure monitors, and it marks the first step to a completely wireless monitoring and control system for producing wells.
· A method to use techniques first developed in the Falklands War for identifying submarines to analyze seismic data.
Houston-based Edge Petroleum, in partnership with Landmark Graphics and Tracor, is working to develop the process, said Susan Mostoris, a senior exploration technologist at Edge Petroleum.
"This is brand new, we haven't even seen any code for it yet," Mostoris said, referring to computer programming codes.
· A new project at Los Alamos National Laboratory that would use techniques for inspecting chemical weapons to analyze the stream of liquids produced from a well.
Oil in an underground reservoir seeps into a well from perforations in the production pipe. A precise analysis of those fluids would allow an operator to more accurately predict the viable production life of a reservoir.
The approach under development, known as swept-frequency acoustic interferometry, would enable energy companies to analyze the fluids coming from each perforation in a well.
Companies involved in that project include British Petroleum, Chevron Corp., Landmark Graphics, Mobil Corp., Texaco, Shell Oil Co., Western Atlas and Schlumberger
Aug. 31, 1998, 11:26PM
Energetic thinkers have lots of ideas for creating power
By MICHAEL DAVISCopyright 1998 Houston Chronicle
Imagine making cheap fuel from lawn clippings, driving a car that could go thousands of miles without refueling, or harvesting frozen natural gas from the ocean floor.
While some of these ideas may sound a little far out, they are all the subject of funded research projects seeking the next breakthrough in energy technology.
Most are not yet of practical use, but each has the potential to significantly change where we get our energy and how we use it.
"The most precious thing you can buy in energy policy is time," said Amory Lovins, director of research at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colo. "The better the technologies get on the supply or demand side, the more time you have to get better still."
· · ·
Roger Sassen, has spent the last 14 years chasing one of the most obscure, but abundant forms of energy on Earth.
Sassen, the deputy director of the geochemical & environmental research group at Texas A&M University, is considered the leading authority on methane hydrates -- huge deposits of natural gas mixed with water and frozen on the ocean floor.
First discovered in 1810, methane hydrates originate as natural gas seeping up through sediments on the ocean floor. High pressure and icy temperatures cause the gas to mix with the water to form frozen outcroppings.
Methane hydrates are nothing new. For years, they have formed naturally in gas pipelines that run through cold, deep water. In pipelines, they are considered a nuisance because they clog up the lines and have to be cleaned out.
Those on the ocean floor are a potential source of natural gas. The problem is that methane hydrates -- unlike traditional gas reserves, which are confined and under pressure -- represent free gas that vaporizes as soon as it reaches the atmosphere. Before they can be commercially produced, they must be contained and transported.
Sassen believes the hydrates could be harvested in their natural environment, packaged in a blimp-like container and towed to processing plants in shallow waters.
The payoff for developing a commercial method to produce methane hydrates could be huge. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates methane hydrate reserves in U.S. waters alone could be as high as 676,000 trillion cubic feet.
Two areas, each about the size of Rhode Island, already have been mapped off the East Coast. They alone are estimated to contain 1,300 trillion cubic feet of methane, or about 70 times annual U.S. gas consumption, according to the Geological Survey.
"Ten years ago, no one really cared about this, but now there has been enough information come out about the volume of energy in gas hydrates that it has become very difficult to ignore," Sassen said. As energy consumption increases and prices rise, Sassen believes, companies will pump more money into developing methods for producing hydrates.
The hydrates are found throughout the world's waters, but the Gulf of Mexico appears to be one of the areas where they are concentrated enough to have commercial production potential.
"It is my feeling that the Gulf of Mexico will be one of the first places where they are commercially exploited," Sassen said. "The huge infrastructure of deepwater facilities and pipelines there is going to become scrap metal in 30 to 40 years unless there is something to put through that system."
Shell Oil Co. is among those funding methane hydrate research. Such research makes sense to the Houston company since the hydrates typically are found in deep water, where Shell is one of the biggest players.
"If we can solve the problem of how to economically find them and produce them, there is a tremendous resource there," said Charlie Williams, manager of well systems for Shell E&P Technology Co.
In addition to the technological hurdles in producing the fuel, there are legal problems to be ironed out -- primarily the question of whether hydrates would be covered under mineral leases struck with state or federal governments.
"There are a lot of problems to be worked out, but it's easier than going to Mars," Sassen said.
· · ·
Mike Robinson's research into creating a fuel and refinery feedstock from lawn clippings and other plant material seems like Oil Patch alchemy.
Robinson, head of chemistry studies at the University of Texas at Permian Basin in Odessa, has been working on his process for about four years. He is at the end of a three-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Using plant material, he has successfully produced a fuel similar to gasoline or diesel.
His process essentially recreates in a laboratory setting the process that takes millions of years in nature: the breakdown of plants into oil and gas. Robinson is intentionally vague when discussing his process because of the proprietary nature of his research.
"We do it in boiling water in an hour," Robinson said. "There are some catalysts and other things that make it go."
The light fuel that Robinson produces floats to the top of the water, where the honey-colored liquid is skimmed off. "It would have about a 90 octane rating," he said.
The process already is covered by one patent, another is in the approval process and another application is being drafted.
"As we have learned more about it, there are all kinds of possibilities," Robinson said. "We can tailor it and design it to make more than just a cheap fuel. We think solvents and chemicals should be the first items produced by the process because of the oil glut and because the profit margin would be better."
While oil companies have not supported Robinson's research, he said it has caught the attention of agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland Co., which is interested in using the process to produce specialty chemicals.
· · ·
All of the major oil companies -- along with several independent firms -- are working on an economically feasible way to turn natural gas into a liquid fuel similar to diesel.
Royal Dutch/Shell and Sasol, the South African oil company, already have built small gas-to-liquids plants, but they are considered more experiments than breakthroughs.
The process, or some form of it, has been around since 1923, when it was discovered by two German scientists, Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch. During World War II, it was used to produce liquid fuel from synthetic gas produced from coal.
Syntroleum Corp. of Tulsa, Okla., holds a license for a proprietary process for converting natural gas into synthetic crude oil. It's working on developing two plants using its process.
One would be an 8,000-barrel-per-day gas-to-liquids plant in Wyoming with the help of Enron Capital & Trade Resources. That plant would convert natural gas into synthetic lubricants, drilling fluids and liquid parafins. Groundbreaking for the plant is expected in the second quarter of 1999, and it is expected to begin operation in late 2001.
Syntroleum also has struck a deal with Texaco and Brown & Root for the construction of a gas-to-liquids plant in an undetermined location outside of the United States. It was originally expected to be online in the third quarter of 1999, but it will not be in operation that soon since a site has not been chosen, said Paul Weeditz, Texaco spokesman in Houston.
"We are continuing to narrow down the list of possible sites," he said. "Before we proceed, we want to make sure we have the best configuration possible. All I can say now is: Stay tuned."
Exxon has some 400 patents on its natural gas process, although it has not built a commercial production facility yet, said Ed Burwell, company spokesman in Dallas.
"We are still trying to negotiate a project in Qatar," he said. The plant Exxon has said it would like to build in Qatar would convert 500 million cubic feet of gas per day into 50,000 barrels of middle distillates, which include kerosene, light and heavy diesel oil and heating oil.
Shell, too, has a process for converting natural gas to liquids, said Charlie Williams, manager of well systems for Shell E&P Technology Co. Shell has been working on its gas-to-liquids process since the early 1970s.
The economic incentive for getting this technology into the field is to tap vast supplies of "stranded gas," natural gas reservoirs that have no pipeline connections in place. If such gas could be converted to liquid, it could be moved by ship or through an existing liquids pipeline.
Syntroleum claims it has solved the problem of mobility with a design that allows the natural gas processing hardware to be mounted on a barge or ship so the refinery can literally go to the reserves. But it has yet to build one of its plants on a barge and test it offshore, said John Ford, spokesman for the company.
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Unlike other emerging energy technologies, fuel cells may soon work their way into consumer products.
They are a variation on the high school chemistry experiment in which electricity is used to separate water into its constituents of hydrogen and oxygen. Fuel cells do the reverse: They combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity with heat and water as the only by-products.
Fuel cells range in size from the dimensions of a cinderblock to those of a small car.
In August, Shell International Oil Products and a subsidiary of Daimler-Benz struck a deal to jointly research the use of fuel cells for a new generation of cars.
Daimler-Benz, Mercedes-Benz's parent company, previously had said that it was spending $145 million to buy a stake in a company named Ballard Power Systems, which is developing fuel-cell technology for a broad range of applications, from powering cars to generating electricity on a large scale. Ford Motor Co. is a partner in that deal.
Lovins with the Rocky Mountain Institute predicts a fuel-cell powered car from a major automaker will come on the market by 2000 -- 10 years ahead of expectations.
Cars powered by fuel cells could travel as much as 5,000 miles on one charge of hydrogen before requiring refueling.
Fuel cells first came to prominence when they were used to generate electricity on space flights, but there are hundreds of other applications -- powering everything from submarines to laptop computers.
"It is the most reliable power source we know," Lovins said. "And it is about to get very cheap; cheaper than an internal combustion engine."
A prototype house in Latham, N.Y. is now running on a fuel cell supplied by Plug Power, based in Latham. The company predicts it will have commercial systems available by 2000 at a cost of about $5,000.
Other technologies that have attracted research funding and are aimed more toward traditional energy exploration and production include:
· A project to study drilling wells with lasers, using the "Star Wars" technology developed to take out missiles from space.
Ramona Graves, a professor of petroleum engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, presented her preliminary research at this year's Offshore Technology Conference. She and her partners in the project are seeking additional funding. So far, they have received about $2 million from the Gas Research Institute.
She and her research partner, Darien O'Brien, recently returned from Russia, where they spoke with scientists on using Russian laser technology.
"Additional funding looks promising," Graves said.
· A project from Baker Oil Tools and the Department of Energy to develop downhole monitors that use production pipe like an antenna to relay well data back to the surface.
The system would monitor pressure, temperature and other conditions in a well. Such information is crucial to operators when making decisions on how to optimize production and when to conduct what can be an expensive workover.
The new monitors would replace more-expensive and less-reliable systems, with wires running up the well to the surface.
The system is considered a breakthough because it would significantly reduce the hardware and installation costs of existing temperature/pressure monitors, and it marks the first step to a completely wireless monitoring and control system for producing wells.
· A method to use techniques first developed in the Falklands War for identifying submarines to analyze seismic data.
Houston-based Edge Petroleum, in partnership with Landmark Graphics and Tracor, is working to develop the process, said Susan Mostoris, a senior exploration technologist at Edge Petroleum.
"This is brand new, we haven't even seen any code for it yet," Mostoris said, referring to computer programming codes.
· A new project at Los Alamos National Laboratory that would use techniques for inspecting chemical weapons to analyze the stream of liquids produced from a well.
Oil in an underground reservoir seeps into a well from perforations in the production pipe. A precise analysis of those fluids would allow an operator to more accurately predict the viable production life of a reservoir.
The approach under development, known as swept-frequency acoustic interferometry, would enable energy companies to analyze the fluids coming from each perforation in a well.
Companies involved in that project include British Petroleum, Chevron Corp., Landmark Graphics, Mobil Corp., Texaco, Shell Oil Co., Western Atlas and Schlumberger
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