Overshadowed by the debate over natural gas exports, a battle is brewing in the Western United States over exports of coal to Europe and, especially, to the booming economies of Asia.  Buoyed by rising overseas demand for American coal, big coal producers including Arch Coal and Peabody are seeking to build new ports and new shipping facilities, particularly along the West Coast, to send U.S. coal from the Powder River Basin, in Montana and Wyoming, across the Pacific.

Those plans have met with fierce resistance from local residents and environmental groups.  ”I want to make it absolutely clear: I am vehemently opposed for a private, for-profit corporation to use eminent domain to condemn my private land for a rail line to export coal to China,” Clint McRae, a rancher whose family has owned their ranch in the Powder River Basin for 125 years, told a an Army Corps of Engineers hearing in Seattle last December, according to The Los Angeles Times.

Also lining up to oppose the exports are elected officials in Oregon and Washington who don’t wish to see huge coal export facilities built on their coastlines.  Saying that rail links to bring Powder River Basin coal to the West Coast “threaten the health of our communities, the strength of our economies, and the environmental and cultural heritage we share,” Seattle mayor Mick McGinn announced last month the formation of the Leadership Alliance Against Coal, which includes Native American tribal groups as well as politicians from towns in Washington State.

Black Piles

Behind the export push are the remaining Big Coal companies, particularly Arch Coal and Peabody, who have largely abandoned their mines in Appalachia and have seen their share prices drop by as much as two-thirds over the last 2 years as utilities across the United States have moved to burn low-cost natural gas rather than coal.  Peabody actually projects that U.S. coal consumption for power generation will rise in 2013, by 60 million to 80 million tons. Even as coal consumption drops in the United States over the long run, though, demand continues to climb in China, India, and even European countries like Germany, which is phasing out its fleet of nuclear power plants.

U.S. coal exports set a record last year of more than 124 million tons, topping the previous record set in 1981.  Because of “must-take” contracts signed years ago, some utilities in 2012 literally found themselves with piles of coal they didn’t want, and dumped these supplies of “distressed coal” on the international market. As a result, exports of coal are expected to drop this year, while remaining high.

Of six proposed coal export facilities on the West Coast, three have already been defeated. The battle over the remaining facilities could be Big Coal’s last stand in the United States.

Still, as I’ve written here before, the end of coal is likely to be prolonged.  The Economist Intelligence Unit, in a report released this month, said that increased overseas demand for the “surprisingly dynamic commodity will drive world coal consumption to more than 8.4 billion tons in 2015.  By far most of that growth will come from China – which puts the United States in the uncomfortable position of cutting its own use of the world’s dirtiest fuel, while feeding the coal hunger of less-developed economies.

As the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere reaches a level not seen in human history, it’s worth considering how much the conventional wisdom surrounding energy has changed in the last 5 years.  In 2008, domestic fossil fuel production (other than coal) was considered to be in permanent decline, with local debates on where to site natural gas import terminals.  Coal-based electricity generation was assumed to be as irreplaceable as it was undesirable.  Increasing energy costs and volatility were unavoidable, while renewable generation cost parity appeared within reach as the bar moved lower.  A nuclear power renaissance was effectively promoted as the only carbonless solution with the potential capacity to displace coal.  The dawn of transportation electrification seemed upon us, while the smart grid took a laser focus on peak load reduction.

Much has changed since then.  Conventional wisdom has caught up with the gas industry experts (including some of my Navigant colleagues), who foresaw how the shale gas boom would reshape the North American energy landscape.  With domestic oil and gas production up sharply, costs are expected to stabilize and volatility decrease.  Planned natural gas import terminals, while still locally controversial, are morphing into export terminals.  Natural gas generation is rapidly displacing coal, leading to significant carbon emissions reductions, though the enabling fracking technologies trigger new concerns.  Even as the cost parity goalposts keep moving, the cost of renewables continues to decline.  The Fukushima accident stalled a North American nuclear renaissance while driving Germany and Japan, at least notionally, to nuclear exits.  Home refueling of natural gas vehicles could replace electric vehicle charging stations in consumer imaginations.  Meanwhile, long-haul trucks, fleet vehicles, and even locomotives are adopting natural gas.  And the smart grid is becoming more important as a means of power resiliency in the face of hurricanes and superstorms than as a vehicle for peak load reduction.

Cheap Gas, Smart Buildings

This all came to mind recently when I moderated a panel discussion titled “The Future Direction of Energy in North America and the Impact on the Intelligent Buildings Sector” at CABA’s Intelligent Buildings Forum in Toronto.  CABA is the Continental Automated Buildings Association, a 25-year old organization dedicated to the advancement of intelligent home and intelligent building technologies (I am privileged to serve on CABA’s board).  The panel participants represented the perspectives of commercial property owner/managers (Cadillac Fairview), utilities (Ontario Power Authority), suppliers (Siemens), and technology researchers (CanmetENERGY).

So what do the major shifts of the last half-decade mean for intelligent buildings?  The panelists agreed that demand for improved energy efficiency remains strong, even if all the incentives for deploying the technology to deliver such efficiency are not always aligned.  Local codes and mandates may be drivers, but even lower-cost energy is not free energy.  Building-to-grid technologies and distributed generation may become even more important if natural gas enables local generation, which is becoming an intriguing option for the storm-ravaged Northeast United States.  Most importantly, all agreed that “cheap, abundant” natural gas is unlikely to spur new interest in dumb buildings.

Electricity generation from coal has plummeted from favor in the last few years.  A majority of Americans now favor stricter regulations on coal plants, even if it means higher energy prices.  In Europe public opinion has tilted away from coal even more sharply: a recent survey showed that 80% of Germans want to end coal-fired generation altogether.  The anti-coal movement has also gained steam, so to speak, in some unlikely places.

That doesn’t mean King Coal will be dethroned any time soon.  In confirmation hearings before the Senate, Gina McCarthy, President Obama’s nomination for the director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, struck a conciliatory tone when asked about the future of the U.S. coal industry.

“Coal has been and will continue to be a significant source of energy in the United States, and I take my job seriously when developing those standards to provide flexibility in the rules,” McCarthy told lawmakers.  “Flexibility,” in this context, means “exceptions to the forthcoming rules on carbon emissions from power plants.”

German environmental minister Peter Altmaier was more blunt last year, speaking of the black fuel’s future on the continent: Coal-fired plants will be needed “for decades to come” to ensure reliable supplies of power.

In fact, coal consumption is rising, both in the United States and in Europe, to say nothing of China.  The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects power generation from coal to increase by nearly 8% in 2013, bringing coal’s portion of total U.S. generation back to 40%, from 37.4% in 2012.  The cause, according to the EIA: “the increasing cost of natural gas relative to coal.”

(Source: Energy Information Administration)

High prices for natural gas are also driving a coal resurgence in Europe; carbon emissions in Germany, for example, increased by 2% in 2012, according to a feature in Nature, largely as a result of increased power generation from cheap coal.

Developments in Germany reflect the larger paradox facing nations attempting to move toward clean energy production: under the Energiewende, Germany’s national program to shift 35% of its power generation to clean sources by 2020, the country is investing €1.5 billion in renewable energy per year.  However, economic forces continue to push power production to fossil fuels.  Generation from solar photovoltaic installations actually decreased by 500 GWh in 2012, and Germany is currently building some 11 GW of coal-fired capacity (though a substantial portion of that will be so-called “clean coal,” replacing older plants with more efficient, lower-emissions technology).  Germany’s decision to shut down its nuclear power plants after the Fukushima nuclear accident is driving the country to coal for baseload power.

“One of Europe’s biggest energy providers, E.ON based in Düsseldorf, announced in January that it plans to close several gas-fired power stations across Europe that were operating at a loss,” Nature reported, “even though they are far less polluting than coal-fired plants.”

Eventually, coal will be phased out.  However, everyone anticipating a rapid changeover from the fuel that powered the Industrial Revolution has a long wait ahead.

A team of researchers at the University of Washington (UW) has won a second round of funding from NASA for their concept for a nuclear fusion-powered rocket to take men to Mars.  Given the very grave problems we face as a nation and as a species, not to mention the long and dismal history of fusion reactor design, the folly of this is astounding.

“We are hoping to give us a much more powerful source of energy in space,” John Slough, the UW research associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics who heads the project, said in a UW website feature, “that could eventually lead to making interplanetary travel commonplace.”

I call this kind of thing “future porn”: the starry-eyed reporting of R&D that aims to accomplish outlandish goals that, even if attainable, will almost certainly prove too expensive, complicated, or non-lucrative to ever become reality.  Future porn stories always contain lots of conditionals and very long timeframes.  The terms “could,” “would,” and “eventually” tend to appear frequently.  “Now, astronauts could be a step closer to our nearest planetary neighbor through a unique manipulation of nuclear fusion,” the UW site reports.

Slough’s team “was one of a handful of projects awarded a second round of funding last fall after already receiving phase-one money in a field of 15 projects chosen from more than 700 proposals.”

I can think of a half-dozen things that NASA should be working on that would be more applicable to our current predicament and beneficial to humanity than harebrained schemes for Mars exploration; warding off annihilating asteroids and dealing with climate change would be top of the list.

Fusion Fail

The fusion-rocket news out of Seattle coincides with a discouraging report in Science News on the National Ignition Facility’s long, quixotic, and so-far failed attempts to produce controlled fusion by compressing a sphere of cryogenic hydrogen using 384 beams from the world’s most powerful laser, thereby releasing tremendous amounts of energy.  NIF scientists 4 years ago confidently predicted “that by September 30, 2012, they would demonstrate a fusion reaction producing net energy, a milestone known as ignition.”  Needless to say, that hasn’t happened.

The NIF account makes for a fascinating case study in the peril of relying on computer simulations.  Essentially, the researchers were convinced by their computer models that the hydrogen would compress symmetrically, i.e., into a near-perfect sphere.  Instead, the material deformed and warped, defying the attempts to unleash more energy than the powerful lasers put in.  “Nature just wants to break you,” said John Edwards, NIF’s associate director of fusion – a remark that echoes the head-shaking sighs of just about everyone who’s ever tried to achieve a sustainable, controlled fusion reaction.

Instead of lasers, the fusion rocket out of UW would use large metal rings, made of lithium, caused by a powerful magnetic field to implode and compress a type of plasma, leading to continuous bursts of fusion that would power the rocket.  To master the intricacies of this ingenious scheme, the scientists have relied upon, you guessed it, “detailed computer modeling.”