Coal industry keeps digging as pressure rises over climate woes

Every second of every day the oversized shovels of the Black Thunder mine claw another three tons of coal from the arid plains of eastern Wyoming.

Sprawled across 20,000 acres, Black Thunder produces more coal than any other mine in the Western Hemisphere. America's thirst for the fuel it provides is larger still: more than 1.1 billion tons consumed in 2006, or almost four tons per person.

But after years of steady growth, spurred by the rising cost of coal's main competitor, natural gas, the industry faces an increasingly uncertain future.

Each ton of coal burned emits more than two tons of carbon dioxide, the prime contributor to global warming. Environmentalists and some policymakers are calling for the country to wean itself from coal by investing in wind, biofuels and other energies and levying new taxes on carbon emissions. In the interim, they want mandates for cleaner power plants.
Yet coal could prove a habit hard to break.

Companies like Arch Coal, the owner of Black Thunder, supply the fuel for more than half the country's electricity. And with the industry's backing, Capitol Hill lawmakers led by U.S. Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., and House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., are pushing to recast coal's image - from climate change culprit to promising "alternative fuel" that could ease dependence on foreign oil and possibly provide an exit plan for the global warming quandary.

Think of it as diet coal: A new wave of coal-fired power plants would capture carbon dioxide to prevent its release into the atmosphere. Other plants would use a process perfected by the Germans to convert the black rock into diesel or jet fuel, to reduce imports of foreign oil.

Both technologies remain untested in the United States on a wide commercial scale. Thomas said that's why the government needs to step in and spur their development through loans to industry and a mandate for 21 billion gallons a year of coal-derived liquid fuels by 2022.

"We're going to be looking at new sources of energy and indeed we should be," said Thomas, whose state leads the nation in coal production. "What we need to be equally concerned with is what we're going to do now, for the next 15 years or so. Coal is one of the largest fossil fuel resources we have."

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