Chris White Tech Reporter
January 13, 2020 11:27 AM ET
Coal plants shuttered at the second fastest rate in U.S. history in 2019, Reuters reported Monday, citing federal data.
Energy companies retired nearly 15,100 megawatts (MW) of coal-fired electricity that year, enough to electrify millions of homes, the report notes, citing data from the Energy Information Administration. The closures come despite President Donald Trump’s promise to bring back the industry.
Roughly 19,300 MWs of coal-generated power were shutdown in 2015 during the latter half of former President Barack Obama’s tenure in office, Reuters reported. (RELATED: More Than 50 Coal Companies Have Been Wiped Out Since Trump’s 2016 Victory)
The report also shows that an estimated 39,000 MW of coal-fired power plant capacity have gone offline since Trump’s first year in 2017. More coal plants will have shut during Trump’s first four years than Obama’s second term if that trend continues, Reuters reported.
Trump has tried to beat back what some people say is inevitable: big coal’s slow decline. The president has nixed nearly 100 environmental regulations during his first three years in office, effectively rolling back much of the rules Obama foisted on the coal industry.
Trump fully eliminated 25 rules designed to rein in air pollution and emissions, as well as 19 that regulate energy producers’ ability to drill and extract oil and gas, The New York Times reported in December 2019. This pell-mell push is generating angst from environmentalists and officials alike.
One of Trump’s biggest accomplishments in the early going was replacing Obama’s so-called Clean Power Plan, which required states to make deep cuts to power sector emissions. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay on the CPP’s implementation in 2016, though some analysts believe that rule and others nonetheless impacted the business model coal companies employ.
Coal-fired power plants are being shut down because natural gas is an intrinsically cleaner and more efficient fuel, and the recent advances in fracking technology have made natural gas abundant and relatively cheap.
Burning coal efficiently requires an extremely hot furnace, and the flue gases need to pass through a baghouse to remove particulates, and scrubbers to remove sulfur oxides, according to EPA rules dating back to the 1970’s. A coal-fired plant generally produces about 35 to 40% of the heating value of coal as electric power.
Natural gas can be used to generate power in a gas turbine, where air is compressed to high pressure, mixed with natural gas for burning, and the heat released from burning natural gas increases its pressure and temperature, and the high-pressure gas is used to drive a turbine to produce electricity (some of the energy is used to drive the air compressor). In a combined-cycle plant, the hot, low-pressure gases leaving the turbine can be used to boil water and generate steam, which is then used to drive another turbine to produce additional electric power. Overall efficiencies of combined-cycle plants usually exceed 60%. Emissions of particulates and sulfur oxides from natural gas are negligible, while the only pollutant of consequence is nitrous oxides, which can be neutralized by reacting them with ammonia to produce nitrogen and water vapor (selective catalytic reduction).
President Trump’s energy and environmental policies are not intended to favor one fuel over another, but only to have them compete on a level playing field, without concerns over CO2 emissions (which are NOT a pollutant). In areas where both coal and natural gas are readily available, natural gas will tend to displace coal due its higher efficiency and lower emissions of real pollutants such as particulates, sulfur oxides, and nitrous oxides. But in areas located far from natural-gas pipelines but well-served by railroad, coal may still be favored since it can be delivered by rail, and no pipelines are needed.
Just because some coal-fired power plants in the USA have shut down during Trump’s term does not mean that Trump has failed the coal industry. Coal is much cheaper to export (particularly by sea) than natural gas (which must be compressed and refrigerated to liquefy it), and the rapid construction of coal-fired power plants in China provide an ample market for exported American coal, since China does not mine coal fast enough to fuel them.
Oh, you just ruined Steve Mosher’s day! Good!
Yes, China will remain a ready market for US coal for some time to come. I heard that an increase is part of the new Phase 1 trade deal with China.
As for the ‘renewables’, get rid of the government subsidies, and they won’t be competitive with coal and natural gas.
It would be neat to see nuclear make a comeback, perhaps with the molten-salt reactors that William Astley talks about above.
I’m a major buyer of natural gas, electricity and coal for a chemical company in Houston. This is all driven by the changes in the PJM market. Most of the coal generation retired was operating at less than 40% run rate. Marcellus is massive and natural gas cost $2/MMBtu in that area. Today you can lock natural gas at $2.50/MMBtu for 10 years! A natural gas plant produces power at 1.7 cents/kwh at that price. A coal plant is far less efficient, has a more costly delivery method (rail), has more frequent outages, more stringent emission controls because of higher pollution (PM2.5, PM10, Sulfur, etc.) and creates a mess with the coal ash waste that has a cost to addressed. All in, a very good coal plant generates power at ~4 cents/kwh. Gas power reacts instantly, coal can’t. The phase out of thermal coal in US is a done deal and a good thing, nothing to do with the environment. This is market forces doing its job. We are swimming in natural gas. Coal main markets in North America will be steel production and exports. The smart coal miners that will be around in 10 years already know this. The rest are just running for another 2-3 years, go bankrupt and retire. They are not naïve, this is their actual plan.
The roots of the decline of coal at the utility I work for began way back in the 1990’s (perhaps even earlier). A combined effect of EPA redefining existing CAA rules on older coal-plants and the prospect for emerging rules (PM2.5 and other emerging regulations) pushed us to sign agreements with EPA that we would shut down coal plants over the next two decades.
There were certainly other factors involved as well.
We were the largest coal-fired power generator of electricity in the US until the last decade.
The current administration is the first in my 35 year career to provide relief from ever increasing regulation – but sadly too late for coal-fired generation at my company.
I can’t speak for other utilities capacity planning teams; but, my team recommended the closure of several coal plants with replacement using natural gas plants for reasons that had nothing to do with any threat of green house gas regulations (I’m now retired). These included:
1) From 2008-2014 economic activity had dropped significantly and the demand for electricity with it.
2) Forecast demand for electricity was flat or falling due, in part, due to demographic changes resulting from the baby boomers retiring and the existence of a much smaller working population behind them.
3) Due to factors 1 & 2 above we had excess production capacity – to the extent that some coal plants had dropped their capacity factors into a non-economical 20% range.
4) Many of the no longer economical coal plants needed pollution upgrades for NOx, SO2, and/or particulate.
5) All of the coal plants were in the range of 60+ years old. So, decreasing the age of our fossil fleet made sense – since some of these plants were nearly at the end of their practical life.
6) The cost of labor and commodity prices were relatively low, consequently construction cost were forecast to be temporally low and remain low in the time frame needed to build natural gas plants.
7) The capital cost of a natural gas plant was considerably lower than that of coal plants.
8) We had a regional excesses of natural gas pipeline capacity.
9) We had service regions where the historical price of delivered coal and gas had been nearly even before the advent of gas fracking and where the price of gas was likely to dominate well into the foreseeable future.
10) We more far more likely to the limited by our NOx emissions that Green House Gas emissions in states where potential increased industrial electrical demand was highest – being relatively heavy in nuclear. So, shifting from coal to gas increased decreased NOx emissions and increased our ability maintain a load profile that could support heavy industry, manufacturing, and (ironically) the appetites of high tech server farms and cloud facilities.
11) We knew that States going the full “renewables” route had a load profile that could not, in the future, provide electricity to heavy industry, manufacturing, and high tech facilities. So our planned load profile meant the States we served would have a very significant economic advantage over renewable heavy States. (Meaning more higher paying jobs over the full spectrum of our population & more customers for us as the U.S. population fled liberal states for the South Eastern U.S.)
12) The flexibility of natural gas plants meant we could cost effectively start them as intermediate plants and shift them to serve as base-load plants should electricity demand increase more than expected. In comparison, a coal plant needs to start as a base-load unit and normally shifts to an intermediate plant role later in life.
13) We could build in (or retain) some of our previous “lost” capacity as a contingency for guessing wrong on our forecast for the “flat to decreasing” electrical demand forecast. Or in other words, as a contingency for our expectation of population shifts into our region as more people choose to live in the Southeast U.S.
14) By shifting, we could retain all of the advantages above while providing electricity at prices at the lowest ends of the U.S. market… thus not subjecting our population to energy poverty and increasing their economic opportunities… while decreasing emissions below that required at the same time.