An Old Prayer for Clean Coal: Strip-Mining Jesus

"And upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." Matthew: 16:13-18.

Declaring his intent to chart a path toward "clean coal," President
Obama announced the establishment of an Interagency Task Force on
Carbon Capture and Storage this week, along with his goal of bringing 5
to 10 commercial coal-fired demonstration projects online by 2016.

All politics aside, I pray for the day our President declares his intent to chart a path toward a coal free future.

In the meantime, I couldn't help but think back to a similarly cold
winter day in 1992, when the National Coal Council held a conference to
come to grips with a disturbing marketing reality: "Coal has a dismal
image." Coal was "maligned and misunderstood." Worse yet, according to
the Coal Council, "Most Americans do not think about coal at all."

The convention of coal companies grappled with these popular images:
Air pollution and visibility, mine safety and labor regulations,
unregulated strip mining, local apprehension, global warming, acid
rain, soot and particulates, acid mine drainage and abandoned mines and
more subsidence, the dreaded images of coal-draped Eastern Europe, and
an unfair media. Coal was destined to play the villain unless
"effective actions are taken to alter the public's perception of coal."

The coal executives said a little prayer for "clean coal."

It had been a handy little slogan for over a century, dating back to
the 1890s when coal companies peddled smoke-free "clean coal" to burn
in your stove or furnace. It had been trotted out every decade or ago,
whenever the coal industry found their image in the mire of workplace
disasters and environmental nightmares.

This week, Big Coal's prayers came true.

And the devastation in the coalfields, and the health of coalfield
residents and coal-fired plant communities, will continue as the
nightmare curse and consequence of this prayer.

Whether the chimera of carbon capture and storage technologies for
coal-fired plants ever come true in the next generation, one fact
remains: More coal, and even dirtier and more costly coal, will be
mined than ever.

Noting that "present estimates of coal reserves are based upon
methods that have not been reviewed or revised since 1974," Richard
Heinberg pointed out in his article, Is "Clean Coal" a Dead End?:

"America's coal resources are indeed vast--none of the
studies claims otherwise. However, during the past century, coal
reserves (the portion of total coal resources that can be mined
profitably with existing technologies) shrank much faster than could be
accounted for by the depletion of those resources through mining. That
is because geologists are doing a better job now of taking into account
"restrictions" that make most coal impractical to mine--factors having
to do with location, depth, seam thickness, and coal quality. In recent
years, some nations have reduced their booked coal reserves by 90
percent or more on the basis of new, more realistic surveys.

Yet there is a subtler but possibly even more decisive price
tag for "clean coal": the energy cost. According to the most recent
estimate (from Harvard University's Belfer Center (5), at least 30
percent of the energy produced by burning coal will be needed to run
the system for capturing, compressing, pumping, and burying CO2.
Therefore any efficiency benefit from gasifying coal at IGCC power
plants would be canceled out.

But already the average quality of coal being mined is declining--that
is, we get less energy for each ton of coal burned today than we did
ten years ago. This is a natural consequence of the "low-hanging-fruit"
principle of resource extraction, in which we tend to consume the
highest-quality, most easily accessed resources first.

So as time goes on, the US will need to burn more coal, while the coal itself will be more scarce and costly. "

And this means that even more dirty coal will be stripmined by
reckless mountaintop removal operations in Appalachia, and stripmining
operations across the country.

Down in my native Eagle Creek community in southern Illinois, I once
stood by the clearing where my family's historic Bethel Church, an
anti-slavery church that had led in the movement to stop legal slavery
in the nearby coal mines, had once been blessed on the land donated by
our family. "Upon this rock I will build my church," went the
scripture; and upon this rock explosives fractured it into pieces.

Our church, along with the entire Eagle Creek valley, was stripmined into oblivion.

With the agreement of the dwindling congregation, the church had
been demolished and a new building built across the road from our
family cemetery. Whether the coal company's blasting had been the
tipping point of despair, or the congregation had dissipated to a
righteous remnant that could no longer support a weekly meeting, the
new church doors rarely opened now.

Last summer, religious organizations representing over 45 million Americans, called on President Obama to end mountaintop removal.

In his powerful dispatches from the coalfields in West Virginia, blogger Denny Tyler
has chronicled the devastating impact of mountaintop removal operations
in depopulating historic communities. In the town of Lindytown, West
Virginia, Tyler captured the haunting image of a boarded up church,
sitting at the basin of a mountain that been been clearcut and prepped
for mountaintop removal.

The coal company's "clean coal" prayer came true for Lindytown:
Thanks to regulatory mining policies, now they can even strip mine
Jesus.