While away in Brazil, Fred Thompson, helps keep the blog relevant by commenting on local issues. Thanks Fred! [Need a hint about the title?]
Coal-fired power plants are a major source
of greenhouse gases, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and
particulate matter. Compared to burning coal, burning natural gas is cleaner
and, in the US, cheaper.
Increased reliance on natural gas in the US has led to
substantial reductions in domestic coal prices, making US coal more attractive
to European importers and potentially more attractive to East Asian importers
as well. Nevertheless, despite steep cuts in US coal prices, once
transportation costs are taken into account, the price of US coal, especially
cleaner coal from the Great Basin, is often higher than the price of locally
mined coal in Europe and East Asia. Evidently the reason that US coal is
preferred in Europe and East Asia to local coal is that it is cleaner. Compared
to the lignite mined in Europe and China, burning western coal from the US
generates 50 percent less CO2, Carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides per unit of
energy, 30-60 percent less sulfur dioxide and particulate matter, and one-tenth
the oxides of mercury. Burning imported cleaner coal in European coal-fired
power plants has, therefore, likely reduced global greenhouse emissions, plus
most other kinds of air pollution, although it may have slowed the transition
to alternative, cleaner energy sources. Burning cleaner imported coal in
Chinese power plants should have an even greater effect, both because the
Chinese burn more dirty coal than the Europeans and because they do not now
anticipate an early transition away from coal.
Most US coal exports flow through US Atlantic and Gulf ports,
like Newport News VA and New Orleans LA, which are a long way from markets in
East Asia. Consequently, Canada is beefing up its Pacific Coast coal-handling
facilities to take advantage of East Asian opportunities and ports up and down
the West Coast of the US are contemplating expansion.
However, the most attractive Pacific Coast option in the US
would probably involve diverting the coal now being shipped to a PGE power
plant in Boardman OR, which is planned for closure by 2020, to East Asia. This option
is attractive because the infrastructure needed to move coal from the pit to
Boardman, which is on the upper Columbia River, is already in place and
currently in use.
The only major question associated with this option has to
do with getting the coal from Boardman to the sea. Here, there are two main
alternatives: off-loading the coal trains to barges at Boardman and moving the
barges to a deep-sea port on the lower Columbia River, where the coal would be
loaded onto freighters for transport across the Pacific, or sending the coal
trains on through the Columbia Gorge and the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan
complex to a deep-sea port.
Under most circumstances, it might be hard to say which of
these alternatives would be better without additional study. The former
involves twice the freight handling costs; the latter entails higher
transportation, environmental, and aesthetic costs and probably significantly
greater traffic disruption, roadway and grade crossing improvements, and safety
problems. Given the unusually high levels of unemployment currently obtaining
on both the upper and lower Columbia rivers, however, it seems reasonable to
discount the freight-handling costs associated with first alternative, since,
in its absence most of the labor used would be unemployed, thereby adding to
the net socio-economic gains associated with this project.
Shipping cleaner coal from the Great Basin to East Asia via
the lower Columbia entails tradeoffs, as do all activities. But its net economic
benefits are clear. It even appears, on balance, that its environmental
benefits could easily outweigh any environmental costs, although not
necessarily the local ones, which under the first alternative are likely to be
small.
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