Coal's Clouded Post-Strike Future

The fuel is there, and it can be dug--but plants may not want to use it

Can a 19th century fuel that is dangerous to mine, difficult to transport and dirty to burn free the world's most energy-hungry nation from its crushing dependence on foreign oil? All along, that has been the big question mark over coal, the linchpin in President Carter's National Energy Plan. Carter's goal for coal is to boost output to 1.2 billion tons a year by 1985--an unprecedented increase of almost 75% over the 685 million tons mined last year--and to coax electric utilities and industry to burn the coal instead of imported oil or scarce natural gas. A cloud of uncertainty as dark as coal dust hung over that ambitious goal even before 165,000 members of the United Mine Workers walked out of the pits last December, shutting off about half the nation's coal output. Settlement of their marathon, 109-day walkout has done nothing to clear up the doubts.

Certainly the coal is there. Beneath the pit heads of Appalachia and the Ohio Valley, and under the sprawling strip mines of the West, lie coal seams rich enough to meet the country's power needs for centuries, no matter how much energy consumption may grow. The physical task of digging the coal is no great problem. But the key question is whether industry can be tempted or prodded into burning the coal in the prodigious quantities that the National Energy Plan contemplates. Officially, Washington's answer is put bluntly by Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger: "We have no alternative." Unless coal is developed as rapidly as possible, the nation will have to squander more and more of its treasure on imported oil. Domestic production of petroleum, natural gas and nuclear power cannot expand fast enough to fill the gap.

But, Schlesinger's words to the contrary, Washington has not yet demonstrated to industry that it can or ought to pay the costs of converting to coal.

Those costs will be enormous, particularly in the West, where utilities rely heavily on oil-and gas-fired plants. Nationwide, Chase Econometrics calculates that by 1985 the total cost of converting old oil-or gas-burning plants might reach $60 billion. That figure does not include the cost of constructing new coal-fired plants, since many of those factories would have to be built anyway, whatever fuel was used to power them--but the cost will nonetheless be huge.

Much of the expenditure will have to go for pollution-control equipment, which can add anywhere from 15% to 40% to the construction and operating costs of a coal-fired plant. Yet no matter how much money is spent, a study by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare warns, burning coal on the scale that Carter contemplates will make the air dirtier. HEW officials think the danger can be kept to a minimum by strict adherence to federal clean-air, safety and waste-disposal standards, but concern persists--with reason. Reacting to it, Washington is virtually certain to require all coal-burning plants, even those that burn low-sulfur Western coal, to install "scrubbers" that cleanse coal smoke. That is one reason why the cost of converting to coal will be so high.

To get industry to pay the costs, the National Energy Plan--if Congress ever passes it--will take a carrot-and-stick approach: tax breaks for companies that switch to coal, extra penalty taxes on those that do not. That would surely provide some incentive, but executives must weigh other factors as well. One reason that many utilities began using oil and gas in the first place is that coal is a cumbersome fuel to work with. For a large electric utility to stockpile a 30-day supply can easily mean having to live with more than a quarter-million tons of the stuff lying around. Worse still, when coal is burned, fully 10% of it remains behind as slag ash that must somehow be disposed of.

In the wake of the winter-long U.M.W. strike, company executives must ponder the vexing question of whether they can count on uninterrupted deliveries. They are only too well aware that the tonnage produced by each worker in the older underground coal mines east of the Mississippi has been cut in half since 1969--partly because of tightened federal health and safety standards, but also because of incessant wildcat strikes by U.M.W. locals. The union-wide walkout, which ended with no assurance against future wildcats, dramatized the trouble.

In the long run, the atrocious relations between the U.M.W. and Eastern mine operators will be a dwindling source of difficulty. By far the greater part of the increase in coal output called for by the National Energy Plan will have to come from the newer, highly mechanized strip mines of the West, where giant shovels simply scrape off the surface rocks and dirt, exposing the coal--and where the U.M.W. has never gained a foothold. There, productivity is soaring. But raging battles over environmental and land-use issues cast doubt over how fast even the Western mines will be allowed to dig coal.

Land-reclamation procedures that recent laws require miners to follow have already added 5% per ton to the price of strip-mined coal. And mine operators do not know what they will have to do to comply with the 1977 federal Surface-Mining Control and Reclamation Act. Reason: states have yet to draft the all-important administrative regulations that the law leaves up to them. When they do, Western strip-mine owners fear, up to 80% of the region's strippable tonnage will be ruled off limits. That would happen if states adopted the broadest possible definition of what constitutes an "alluvial valley," where no strip mining is allowed because it might make impossible the recovery of water resources. Federal officials contend that the mine operators' worries are exaggerated.

Even if strip-mine operators can keep production expanding, there is no guarantee that the coal can be shipped around the country in the quantities needed. Just to keep a 1,000-megawatt electric generator (large enough to serve a community of 100,000) supplied for 24 hours takes upwards of 10,000 tons of coal, enough to fill a freight train more than a mile long. According to a study by Pacific Power & Light Co., if all electric utilities in Oregon and Washington built nothing but coal-fired plants to meet the growth in energy demand, by the year 2000 freight trains a mile long would have to rumble through those states every 60 minutes, day and night, carrying nothing but coal.

Could the railroads move that much coal and still be able to ship agricultural products, lumber and other freight? A Department of Transportation study estimates that the railroads would have to spend $10 billion between now and 1985 to upgrade their aging railbeds and rolling stock. That may seem excessive, but no one will really know just what shape the nation's railbeds are actually in until freight trains hauling millions of tons of coal begin hurtling along them every day in the 1980s.

Slurry pipelines through which crushed coal and water can be pumped underground for hundreds or even thousands of miles could solve much of the problem. But such pipelines eventually have to cross railroad tracks, and the railways have been able to block their construction by refusing to grant right-of-way easements. Many farmers oppose slurries because the pipelines would siphon off large amounts of water that are badly needed for irrigation in the parched West. A bill now in Congress would force the railroads to provide the easements.

Aiding up the pluses and minuses, a number of utilities are coming around to the view that a mix of different energy sources and an increased emphasis on conservation are preferable to reliance on coal alone. For years, the utility industry has favored nuclear power, and now that option is beginning to look better to utility executives. Though nuclear plants are more expensive to build and inspire great public fear about safety, their operating costs are about the same as those of a coal-fired plant. Last week the Supreme Court gave the nuclear alternative more appeal. It issued a unanimous ruling that sharply restricts the ability of intervenors to delay interminably the construction of a nuclear plant by filing lawsuits after the plant has been licensed by federal and state authorities.

The nation indeed may need more nuclear power, but it also needs coal in approximately the quantities Carter envisages. Technology may eventually help to get it. If the prices of natural gas and oil rise enough to make the effort pay off, processes exist to change coal into synthetic gas and oil to drive cars, heat homes and run factories. The Government is already planning guaranteed loans and funds for research and development to push along research efforts already being pushed by private companies.

For the immediate future, though, coal's role in the nation's economy remains tied to its conventional uses. The trouble in exploiting those to the fullest, summarizes Otes Bennett Jr., president of Cleveland's big North American Coal Corp., is that "it's foolish to talk about doubling production until the demand is there. So far, the conversion of industry and utilities to burning coal just hasn't happened." Nor will it happen until the Administration clears up the confusion surrounding its goals.

The target of 1.2 billion tons of coal by 1985 may be overly optimistic, but production and use of roughly 1 billion tons is feasible. To get it, the Administration should vigorously back the slurry-pipeline bill and, more important, signal unmistakably that it will not let bureaucrats draft strip-mining or clean-air regulations so restrictive that they thwart the goals of Carter's energy plan. If it does that, utilities, railroads and industry generally can probably raise even the huge sums of money necessary to convert to coal, and they will have an incentive to do so. Unfortunately, the Administration has let the impression get around that, in the biting words of Kenneth Ch'uan-K'ai Leung, a coal analyst with the Wall Street investment firm Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Co.: "President Carter is anxious to use more coal as long as it isn't mined or burned." While that impression lasts, the nation's most abundant energy resource will be neither mined nor burned in the quantities necessary.

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