Coal

http://www.ft.com/intl/companies/oil-gas

New York – The US generated more of its electricity from gas than from coal for the first time ever in April — in a sign of how the shale boom is putting mounting pressure on the country’s mining industry.

Plunging prices for natural gas, which have fallen alongside oil since last summer, led to it being used to generate 31 per cent of America’s electricity in April, while coal contributed 30 per cent.

This was the first month in US history that gas-fired electricity generation surpassed coal-fired generation, according to SNL Energy, a research firm — although it came close in 2012 when gas prices were also very weak. In 2010, coal provided 45 per cent of US power.

Since then, competition from cheap shale gas — unlocked by the rise of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — plus a growing regulatory burden on coal-fired power plants, has squeezed out coal use. That trend has accelerated in 2015.

Brett Blankenship of Wood Mackenzie, the research company, said the combination of cheap gas and new environmental regulations such as curbs on mercury and related pollution from coal-fired plants was having a particularly deleterious effect on coal generation.

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http://www.nytimes.com/

Tighter regulations, environmental lawsuits and a pivot toward cleaner-burning natural gas have knocked communities like Somerset, Colo., on their heels.

SOMERSET, Colo. — For more than a century, the economy and identity of this tiny community wedged into the mountains have been defined by the coal heaps, railroad tracks and deep underground mines that filled train cars with coal and miners’ pockets with money. “Welcome to Somerset,” says the blue sign at the entrance to town, “Coal mining town since 1896.”

Maybe no longer. The Elk Creek Mine, towering over Somerset, once employed about 200 people, but it has been shut down since a collapse and underground fire in December 2012, with just nine employees left to manage its dismemberment. It is selling off its equipment, handing over its water treatment plant to residents and weighing whether to tear down the concrete coal silo that looms over the town and close for good.

“Everybody thinks our community is just going to fold and fall down,” said Terry Commander, who runs the local water district. “We have to learn how to be able to stand up on our own.”

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http://www.reuters.com/

WILLIAMSON, WV – With coal trains chugging past in the distance, Jack Perry watches as his wife, Margie, plants row upon row of Hungarian pepper seedlings in the community garden that residents of this West Virginia coal town call the “Garden of Eatin’.”

“The peppers they sell at the stores don’t taste anything like this,” says Perry, a retired coal worker. His grandfather brought over the original batch of seeds in the early 1900s when he arrived from Hungary to work in southern West Virginia’s mines.

The coal industry that sustained those generations is on life support in Williamson and surrounding Mingo County, battered by exhausted mines and competition from natural gas. Williamson’s faded sign welcoming drivers to “the heart of the billion dollar coal field” now competes with billboards for weight loss and pain clinics, and the main street is lined with empty storefronts and pawn shops.

Unlike their neighbors in Kentucky, where there have been state-sponsored economic transition efforts, West Virginians have been largely left on their own to respond to coal’s decline. The state’s politicians have focused on fighting federal emissions regulations in Congress and in court, blaming the Obama administration for imposing what they say are crippling costs on the industry.

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