Date: July 22, 2001
Source: Just Within Reach
With Permission from:
[email protected]
How Coal Got Its Glow Back Part 2
By Jeff Goodell The New York Times
How Coal Got Its Glow Back--
PART 2 --
CONTINUED FROM PART 1
"Everyone thinks we just blow these mountains up," McDaniel says, pulling on
a cigarette and leaning against the hood of his Blazer. "But that's not
really the way it works at all. It's really quite an elaborate process."
Later, back in the mining office, McDaniel will show me intricate diagrams
of the mining operation -- the way mountains are dismantled not in one blast
but methodically, layer by layer. "What I like about this work," says
McDaniel, "is the orchestration of all the different parts, from the permits
to the rock trucks. When it all goes right, it's almost like music." And if
a few mountains are lost along the way? "There are lots of mountains around
here," McDaniel responds, sweeping his hand grandly across the horizon.
Of course, many nature lovers feel a bit more protective toward those peaks.
Mountaintop-removal mining presents a thorny problem for a publicly held
company like Arch. Stockholders demand growth and profit, but at what cost?
Unlike subtler forms of environmental destruction, the results of
mountaintop-removal mining are there for the whole world to see. Unless, of
course, you don't let them into your mine.
"We certainly feel that the effects of mountaintop mining are sometimes
exaggerated," says Steven Leer, president and C.E.O. of Arch. In fact, Leer
says, only about one-half of 1 percent of West Virginia has been
mountaintop-mined. (Mountaintop-removal mining is also practiced in Kentucky
and other Appalachian states, but to a lesser degree.) Local
environmentalists like Cindy Rank of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy
says that the one-half of 1 percent figure may be true if you look at the
entire state. But almost all of the mining goes on in the hilly southern
counties, where Rank estimates that close to one-fifth of the land has been
blasted away.
Whatever the actual scale of these operations may be, there's no question
that the environmental damage wrought on the region has been enormous. Some
470 miles of West Virginia's streams have been filled in by mountaintop
mining. Thousands of families have been displaced; streams and rivers have
been polluted by acid runoff. Wherever there is mining, coal companies build
lakes to hold the water used to wash the coal -- the water in these lakes,
called slurry ponds, is a gross, metallic mix of coal dust, mercury, sulfur,
arsenic and other chemicals. In 1972, in Buffalo Creek, Ky., a poorly built
dam at a slurry pond broke, sending a wall of water over the town below,
killing 125 people. Last October, at a mine in Inez, Ky., operated by Massey
Energy, another dam broke, dumping 250 million gallons of coal slurry into
rivers and streams and killing wildlife as far as 60 miles away. Two weeks
ago, unusually high runoff from mountaintop-removal mines contributed to the
flooding that devastated West Virginia.
Joan Mulhern, a lawyer with the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund in
Washington, argues that mountaintop-removal mining is "a blatant violation
of the Clean Water Act." In 1999, United States District Judge Charles H.
Haden 2nd, a Republican, agreed. Responding to a lawsuit brought by
environmentalists and local residents to halt a 3,100-acre expansion of
Arch's Dal-Tex mine, Judge Haden's ruling essentially stopped the state from
issuing new mountaintop-removal mining permits and shut down Dal-Tex. It was
a stunning blow for Arch: the company laid off or transferred nearly 400
people and took a $365 million write-down. Within weeks of the ruling,
Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, long a vigorous supporter of Big Coal,
tried to overturn the ruling with legislation -- only to be opposed by the
Clinton administration. In April, however, the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court
reversed Haden's decision. It is a complex ruling, but essentially the court
decided that the Clean Water Act is superseded in West Virginia by state
laws that permit the destruction of streams during mining operations. Arch
is now applying for the permits to reopen Dal-Tex, while activists are
pushing for the case to be reheard by the Appeals Court.
Whatever the legality of mountaintop-removal mining, the idea that Arch can
somehow keep its operations out of the public eye is naive. The day before I
visited Hobet 21, I arranged an aerial tour of the mines with Susan Lapis, a
local pilot. On a sultry summer morning, we took off from the Charleston
airport in her Cessna 182, climbing through the gray-yellow haze that often
makes the air around Charleston look like L.A. on a bad day.
At about 3,000 feet, the mountains looked like a soft, undulating green
carpet below. About 15 minutes outside of the city, rips in that carpet
suddenly appeared -- wide-open bald spots where raw earth was exposed. I
could see the deep cuts in the earth and the thick horizontal seams of raw
coal. As we headed farther into Big Coal country, the rips and bald spots in
the land became larger and more frequent. Some mountains looked as if they
had been sliced off with a machete. Others were so deeply mined they looked
like miniature Grand Canyons.
We flew south for more than an hour, passing dozens of mines, some active,
some inactive, all naked and raw. Sandwiched between the bright pink flesh
of exposed mountains were enormous slurry ponds of metallic green and gold.
Whenever I looked out at the horizon, there were more mines in the distance.
Eventually, we circled down to 500 feet above Hobet 21. It was enormous and
busy. Giant dump trucks filled with rock scurried around, while huge
scooping machines ripped out tons of earth. In Silicon Valley, it is
commonplace to talk about technology empowering individuals. Here was
empowerment on a colossal scale -- one man with the right machine could
destroy a mountain.
When Bill Raney, the head of the West Virginia Coal Association, walks into
a bar in Charleston on a recent evening, the whole place lights up: "Hey,
Bill!" Raney is slim and folksy, with a thick drawl that clashes with his
well-tailored blue suit. He has a kind word or a joke for everyone in the
room. When the waitress arrives with his Coors Light, she stares at him and
says, "You look familiar." Raney winks and drawls, "A face this ugly is
kinda hard to forget, ain't it?"
The day before, a front-page story had appeared in The Wall Street Journal
detailing how Raney, along with a local coal baron, James H. Harless, had
helped engineer President Bush's electoral victory in West Virginia last
November. The five electoral votes of this longtime Democratic state gave
Bush the slim edge he needed to win the presidency. The piece chronicled the
grass-roots organizing Raney did on Bush's behalf, as well as noting that,
nationwide, Big Coal donated $3.8 million for the 2000 election, tripling
its 1996 contributions. Almost all of that money went to Republicans.
Over his beer, Raney says he was "embarrassed" by the story and chuckles at
the idea that he was the kingmaker in the election. "I just fought for what
I believe in, like I always do," he says. Still, when Raney talks about last
year's election, there's a mix of triumph and relief in his eyes. "We really
worked hard on that," Raney says, speaking for his association, which
includes 78 mining-related companies in West Virginia. "We had a lot at
stake."
Indeed they did. In West Virginia, the immediate fear was that a Gore
administration would find a way to crack down on mountaintop-removal mining.
But more broadly, it was the looming threat of carbon-dioxide regulations
that fired up Big Coal to support Bush. Gore, after all, had written an
entire book about the danger of global warming. And there's nothing that
freezes the heart of a coal-company executive like frank talk about
greenhouse gases. Cars and coal-fired power plants are the two biggest
emitters of carbon dioxide and other gases that are warming the climate. But
when the carbon whip comes down, everyone knows whom they'll go after first.
"We're walking around with a big bull's-eye on our foreheads," jokes James
Rogers, C.E.O. of Cinergy, a Midwestern coal-burning utility.
Twenty miles west of Charleston is the John Amos power plant. Squatting on
the banks of the Kanawha River, this plant run by American Electric Power
consumes up to 26,000 tons of coal a day and generates enough electricity to
light two million homes. Inside the plant, a huge iron-encased turbine spins
in a huge, echoing room as big as a church. Ninety-six pipes feed pulverized
coal dust into a burner at tremendous pressure, where it heats the water
that produces steam that spins the turbine that produces the electricity.
Flowing from the tops of the plant's three enormous cooling towers is what
appears to be a cloud of pollution. It is not. It's just water vapor; the
E.P.A. strictly regulates visible emissions. But though all but
imperceptible, plenty of pollution spews daily from the plant's three
slender 900-foot smokestacks. The largest polluter in West Virginia, John
Amos in 1999 dumped 98,000 tons of sulfur dioxide; 47,500 tons of nitrogen
oxides; and 838 pounds of mercury, just a tiny amount of which in a lake
make the fish unfit for human consumption.
But the real whopper is the amount of carbon dioxide: 16 million tons of it.
This is the Achilles' heel of Big Coal. With respect to the pollutants that
cause smog and acid rain, modern coal-powered plants can compare favorably
with gas-powered plants. But even the newest, most efficient conventional
coal plant emits three times as much carbon dioxide as a natural gas plant.
And old, less efficient coal plants burn considerably more CO2.
For a utility executive, building a new power plant means thinking 60 years
down the road -- the life expectancy of a new plant. It's also a
billion-dollar investment that could be rendered obsolete virtually
overnight by a global crackdown on carbon dioxide. As Manoj Guha, a
technology manager at American Electric, puts it, "You'd have to be crazy to
build a conventional coal-fired power plant right now."
There are ways to deal with carbon dioxide from power plants. The easiest
remedy is creating "carbon sinks" -- that is, the planting of thousands of
trees, which suck up carbon dioxide. And although it's great P.R. for the
power companies (there are so many parrot and jungle scenes in American
Electric's corporate literature that you'd think the company was
headquartered on the banks of the Amazon, not in Ohio), carbon sinks have a
limited usefulness. In 1999, the United States released about 5.5 billion
tons of carbon dioxide from all sources; you'd need a forest the size of
Jupiter to absorb all that.
Another option is more high-tech. Instead of burning coal, a chemical
process can be used that transforms it into a gas, which can then be burned.
Removing much of the carbon dioxide during this process is a fairly simple
job. The downside of gasification, as this process is called, is that it is
relatively untested for power generation; there are only two such plants up
and running in the U.S. Of greater concern to Big Coal, however, is the fact
that they're rather more expensive to build than conventional coal plants.
And it still leaves you with the problem of what to do with the carbon
dioxide once you remove it from the coal. On July 13, the Bush
administration took a small step forward by announcing several partnerships
with private industry to develop new technologies for "carbon
sequestration" -- capturing and storing emissions underground or at the
bottom of the ocean.
For years, executives in the power industry had a "hear no evil, see no
evil" response to any mention of carbon dioxide. Recently, that has started
to change. Progressive leaders in the industry, like Jim Rogers at Cinergy,
were tiring of what he calls "environmental policy through litigation." Last
year, Rogers and others began back-room talks with various leaders in the
environmental movement to see if a long-range regulatory agreement could be
hammered out. In exchange for some kind of broad relief from the current
death-by-a-thousand-blows style of environmental regulation, Rogers and
others were willing to cross the Rubicon and acknowledge that carbon-dioxide
emissions need to drop significantly.
But the powerful hard-line faction of Big Coal, which is led by the Southern
Company, the country's biggest utility, and Peabody Energy, the world's
biggest coal-mining company, would rather go back to rubbing sticks together
than embrace pollution controls. The hard-liners want to keep pumping the
plants as they have done for decades; to them, caving in on carbon dioxide
is unthinkable.
"These guys aren't dumb," says Dale Simbeck, an executive at SFA Pacific, an
energy consulting firm. "In a carbon-constrained world, coal is a clear
loser." Of course, even hard-liners publicly pledge their commitment to
various clean-coal technologies. But they always insist that such changes
can only be made decades down the road, Simbeck says. "The auto industry
uses the same strategy," he explains. "It's always heralding some
magnificent breakthrough just over the horizon, while it fights like hell to
keep doing business as usual in the here and now."
No one embodies this no-compromise philosophy better than Irl Engelhardt,
chairman and C.E.O. of Peabody Energy, which is headquartered in St. Louis.
Engelhardt, 54, keeps a low public profile. (He refused to be interviewed
for this story.) He is a brilliant financial strategist, having successfully
guided Peabody through a heavily leveraged buyout a few years ago. Last
year, he set his sights on taking Peabody public. This meant, among other
things, that as the 2000 election took shape, Engelhardt had a huge stake in
ensuring that the future of Big Coal looked rosy. And nothing clouds that
picture faster than talk about global climate change.
Although Peabody's corporate literature is full of talk about the company's
environmental sensitivity, behind closed doors, Engelhardt himself is
decidedly less progressive. In March, during a meeting on Capitol Hill with
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a strong advocate of tougher regulations
on power-plant emissions, Engelhardt told the senator, according to several
attendees: "Climate change is just an environmentalist's P.R. tool. There's
no science to back that up." (Through a spokesman, Engelhardt said he
"believes that current climate-change science is uncertain.") Of particular
concern to Engelhardt was the Kyoto treaty, which would have capped carbon
dioxide emissions at pre-1990 levels. During a speech last July at the
Edison Electric Institute, the utility industry's lobbying association,
Engelhardt used classic Big Coal scare tactics, telling the group that
adhering to the Kyoto treaty would require the country to build 68 new
nuclear power plants by 2020 and boost wind power by 22 times today's
output. And the coal industry, Engelhardt implied, would be out of business.
To shape the debate, Engelhardt was not afraid to put his money where his
mouth was. Peabody donated $250,000 to the Republican National Committee
during 1999-2000, and Engelhardt himself gave $100,000 to the Bush-Cheney
inaugural fund. During the same cycle, Steve Chancellor, the head of Black
Beauty Coal, an affiliate that is 82 percent owned by Peabody, gave $344,750
to Republicans. If you add it all up, Peabody, Engelhardt and Engelhardt's
business associates donated close to $700,000 to President Bush and his
party last year.
Not surprisingly, Bush named Engelhardt to the transition advisory team for
the E.P.A.; for a while, his name was in the running for secretary of
energy, a position that eventually went to former Senator Spencer Abraham of
Michigan. Another Peabody executive, John Wootten, served on the transition
advisory team for energy. In mid-March, when Bush abandoned his support of
carbon-dioxide regulations, many saw Engelhardt's fingerprints all over the
decision: "I think you could say Engelhardt got what he paid for," says the
C.E.O. of a major power company.
But that doesn't mean that Big Coal has won the battle. "The pressures to do
something about CO2 emissions are just enormous," says Kris Krause, a senior
executive at Wisconsin Energy. And they are about to get bigger. Senator
Jeffords has made clear to staff members that he will make power-plant
emissions legislation his No. 1 priority this fall. There is a rising sense
that, whatever the complexities of the science of climate change may be,
America can no longer afford to stick its head in the sand. Even Senator
Byrd and Senator John McCain, neither of whom is any great friend of the
environmental movement, have suggested that it is time to start thinking
about a carbon-capped future. It will be a long, hard fight.
By all accounts, the White House was caught off-guard by the uproar that
followed the president's reversal on carbon dioxide. (The morning of the
announcement, one senior administration official crowed to Rusty Matthews,
an energy lobbyist, that it would be "a one-day story.") But contrary to
what you might guess from the White House's flat-footedness on this, there
are senior staff members in the administration who take climate change
seriously and believe we cannot wait another four years to do something
about it. However, these same staff members are trapped in a box. Any
movement by Bush toward a carbon-capped world will anger Big Coal supporters
in states like Ohio, West Virginia and Illinois, all of which were crucial
to his election victory; any movement away from carbon caps will further
underscore the growing public perception that the president is out of touch
on environmental issues and could cause trouble for Republicans in next
year's midterm elections.
So could New Source Review. Christie Whitman has been adamant that this be
seen as an open process and points out that, in addition to four public
hearings around the country, her staff has consulted with more than 96
organizations. But all this public exposure has only heightened awareness of
the issue, turning it into a litmus test of the administration's
environmental commitment and continuing the debate over whether Bush is in
the energy industry's pocket.
However it plays out, there has already been one clear winner in the
fossil-fuel sweepstakes: Irl Engelhardt and Peabody Energy. In mid-February,
while Bush's energy task force was still formulating its policy, Peabody
Energy filed with the S.E.C. for an initial public stock offering. On May
22, just five days after the energy plan was released, Peabody went public.
Tech stocks were tanking, but Peabody defied gravity, opening at $28 and
shooting up to close at the end of the day at $36. Engelhardt's personal
stake of more than 633,000 shares was worth more than $23 million.
After leaving Hobet 21, hoping to get a look at the operation from a
different perspective, I take a drive into the mountains that surround the
mine. I was told that there is a spot between the towns of Big Muddy and
Ugly where you can get a close look at the pit. I drive an hour or so,
passing disassembled 4 by 4's up on jacks, rusting mobile homes and small
but beautifully tended gardens flowering in rare patches of sunlight. At one
point, hopelessly lost, I stop to talk to a pimply kid on a muddy Honda ATV
parked beside the road. I ask him if he knows where I can get a look at
Arch's big mine. Without saying a word, he nods, starts his ATV and heads up
the road. I follow. He turns onto a dirt road, and we come to a small
clearing -- there, a thousand yards or so in the distance, is the open pit.
There are trails down the hill, and I can hear the buzz of other ATV's along
with the grinding of the dragline and the high-pitched whine of dump trucks
struggling up a grade.
"You ride down there?" I ask the boy, whose name was Robby.
"Yeah. It's killer."
"They don't chase you off?"
"Nah. They know we're just havin' fun."
I nod. "Anyone in your family work there?"
"I wish," he says. "Good money. These guys, they all have new boats."
I thank Robby for showing me the spot; he slips on his helmet and rides off
down the hill. A few minutes later, I see him on a far hill in the mine, not
far from where Emerson and McDaniel and I stood earlier, tearing up and down
the hillside with several friends. Add kids with ATV's to the list of
creatures who thrive in reclaimed mine habitat.
Earlier, McDaniel scoffed at me when I asked if coal companies deliberately
site mines in places that are hidden from public view -- we mine where the
coal is," he said. Still, there is something secretive about all this and
about energy production in general. We'd all like to imagine that the wired
world just spins on its own, that electricity comes out of the wall, that
none of this aging and immense and complex machinery -- the dump trucks and
railroad cars and power plants -- really exists. And because we have such
great faith in technology, we want to believe that coal can somehow be made
perfectly clean, that nuclear power can be made completely safe, that wind
farms can stop mutilating birds, that gas can be extracted from the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge in, as the White House often puts it, "an
environmentally sound manner." But producing energy is simply not a zero-sum
game -- at least, not yet. There is always risk and loss; there are always
unintended consequences. Indeed, this is why mountaintop-removal mining is
so controversial. Greenhouse gases are tough to see, but you can't miss a
carved-up mountain: it makes explicit the trade-off we make to keep our
wired world humming. It is the energy equivalent of witnessing the slaughter
of the cow that goes into our hamburger.
Despite its many troubling aspects, coal is likely to remain a big part of
the energy mix in America for a long time to come. Hydrogen-powered fuel
cells are fun to dream about, but in the real world, coal's plentiful
reserves, as well as the entrenched infrastructure -- mines, railroads,
power plants -- mean we aren't going to get off this black rock anytime
soon. The question is, how much damage must be done to the mountains, to the
air, to the water, to our lungs, to the planet? Big Coal can either join Big
Tobacco on the periphery of American life, an isolated empire of denial and
abuse, or it can start listening to its own polished rhetoric about its
cleaning up its act. Granted, embracing pollution controls or mining coal in
ecologically sensitive ways is not cheap. But it all depends on how you
calculate the price.
For now, the boom continues. I stand on the hilltop for a few more minutes
and watch the dragline. The big scooper tears into the earth, lifts 100 tons
of dirt away and dumps it in another pile, with no more apparent effort than
it takes my 3-year-old son to shovel sand on the beach. The dragline works
with an incessant rhythm -- digging, lifting, dumping, digging, lifting,
dumping -- and it is going on here at Hobet 21, and at mines all over the
country, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As McDaniel explained to me a
few hours earlier, "It costs too much to stop."
** JWR would like to thank a friend who provided the transcription of the
article which appears in both hard copy and online. **
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