The future of coal

I am sidelined by illness today so I thought I'd spend some of my newfound free time exploring a topic I've considered before.

Although many of my friends and family would be sad to hear it -- and disbelieve me strongly -- the long-term trend for domestic coal looks bleak. Of course as gas begins to replace coal its price will go up, but coal is dirty. Yes, gas emits carbon dioxide too, and has some of its own challenges. However, burning coal emits more carbon dioxide, as well as harmful particulates, than any other choice to power our electric grid. Given the power of states and the federal government to limit harmful emissions from coal, I don't think that coal will ever recover from its current slump, and in fact the warming climate will push it into further obscurity.

Here's some EIA data showing the change in coal demand from 2011-2012:

What I did is took the numbers of millions of tons of coal demand by electric utilities for 2011 and subtracted 2012 to generate a "demand loss" bar for each month. I then divided this absolute change in tons by the 2011 amount of tons to generate a % loss in 2012. Coal prices have basically flatlined/held stable/declined slightly even as natural gas consumption spiked, which means that the price point for gas is still much more attractive than coal.

Coal prices are now back at 2005 levels:

Production is trending down, too, probably in an effort to increase prices. In January, production fell from 95 to 83.9 Mtons = 11.7% drop. In February 85.8 to 76.7 Mtons = 10.6% drop.

And yet no effect on prices yet. Probably without the drop in production the prices would have plummeted more.

So let's put the pieces of the puzzle together:

1. Power plants are demanding less coal due to two factors: weather and switching to gas
2. Overall demand/consumption of coal in 2011 was equal to 1996! (Table 6.1, page 93/211)
3. Coal prices are back at 2005 levels, a drop of 50% from 2008 prices.
4. Coal production is down, but the price of coal continues to flatline/fall
5. EPA regulations on power plant emissions will begin in 2015, which should further impact coal

Now that doesn't mean that international coal use will wane. Estimates I've seen predict an enormous increase in coal plants in India and China. So there will be a huge market for exporting coal, although this may be usurped by gas too (since Australia, Russia and the US will be exporting that too). And there has been a small uptick in exports lately, but not nearly enough to close the gap in falling domestic consumption (Fig. 6.1)

Testimony a few weeks ago in Congress about the good news from the drop in coal's fortunes:

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption are down 13 percent since 2007. The economic downturn is part of the story. But the most significant part is the result of natural gas supplanting coal in electric generation at a rapid rate.

That's good news. But not to coal miners and their families...