Coal Rush

For all the talk about renewable energy, the extraction industry is alive and well in the United States. In Texas, utility company TXU Energy has proposed building 11 new coal-fired power plants.American Electric Power, of Columbus, Ohio, is also seeking approval for several new coal plants. In the interior West,Minnesota-based Xcel Energy is building one of the nation’s largest coal plants in Pueblo, Colorado, while planning for others in the next few years.

These are but a sampling of the 150-plus new coal-fired plants being proposed throughout the United States, according to the Department of Energy’s National Technology Laboratory. The vast majority of them will use conventional coal burning technology. (Elsewhere in the world, hundreds of new coal-fired plants are planned or under construction, some 550 of them in China alone. See “China and Her Coal,” p. 14.) Of the 2004 U.S. total emissions of 5.9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), electric power generation contributed 2.3 billion metric tons, or 39 percent, and coal-fired plants accounted for 82 percent of that. Because CO2 is the dominant human-caused greenhouse gas, that unheralded feat makes power plants among the biggest...