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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (March 30, 2011)
News washington State Faces Quandary: Export Coal That’s Too Dirty to Burn? Seattle (AP) — Just as Washington is weaning itself off coal, two companies are pushing to make the state a leading exporter of the fossil fuel. That has led environmentalists to wonder: If coal is so dirty that Washington won’t use it, should the state be sending it overseas? Last year, a seaport just across the U.S. border in Delta, British Columbia, shipped 27 million tons of North American coal abroad. It’s the busiest coal- export operation on the continent. Now a company wants to ship up to 60 million tons of coal a year from refurbished docks near the Columbia River’s mouth. Another company, which has a contract to export 24 mil- lion tons of Rocky Mountain coal each year, plans to build a major ship- ping terminal near Bellingham. ``It’s a terrible, unprecedented idea,’’ said Brett VandenHeuvel, executive director of the nonprofit Columbia Riverkeeper, told The Seattle Times. ``If we supply China with a large and inexpensive source of coal, then they’re more likely to just keep burn- ing it.’’ When Cowlitz County granted a permit for a coal-shipping terminal in Longview, VandenHeuvel and others appealed. Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer came to Washington to remind the state that Montana had helped supply TransAlta’s coal for years, and several other Washington utilities have owned a piece of a coal-fired power plant in tiny Colstrip, Mont. ``It’s difficult for me to understand, since Washington state and your utilities invested in coal-fired plants in south-central part of the Chinese themselves, who say we’re being sanctimonious about our con- cern with the environment, given that a third of our energy still comes from coal and we consume the products China makes with its cheap energy,’’ he said. In fact, coal use in the U.S. is not really growing — but coal mining is. Just last week, the federal government agreed to lease access to an additional 750 mil- lion tons of coal in the Powder River Basin. In Montana, Schweitzer said it’s unfair that his state has little say about where that coal can go just because Montana doesn’t have a seaport. Brett VandenHeuvel, Columbia ``What’s next? Montana is known Riverkeeper for producing some of the finest malt- ing barley that’s exported off the West Coast,’’ he said. ``Will somebody But China still gets nearly 70 percent of show up next month and say alcohol is a its power from coal and that isn’t expected contributor to poor health and we don’t sup- to change soon because the country is build- port alcohol, so you can’t ship it from here?’’ ing coal-burning power plants. China, too, is blessed with coal. But its Some experts believe the U.S. should accept coal’s growth as unavoidable and mines are dirty and dangerous, and its rail focus on cleaning its emissions. ``It’s a paradox,’’ said Charles Ebinger, director of the Brookings Institution’s ener- gy policy initiative. ``The Chinese are real- ly moving vigorously on green technology, but Asia is growing so fast that demand for energy of all forms is going through the roof.’’ The Chinese perspective on this debate is nuanced, said Joel Darmstadter, an energy and climate analyst with Resources for the Future, a Washington, D.C., think tank. ``That theme has even surfaced on the Montana for three decades,’’ Schweitzer said in an interview. ``You’ve been digging our coal, burning our coal, and building your economy on our coal for years.’’ The situation overseas complicated the debate. China has committed to cleaning up its energy. It is developing wind, solar and geothermal technology and is mandating strict pollution controls on power plants. ‘It’s a terrible, unprecedented idea’ infrastructure is so bogged down it’s easier for coastal cities to import coal from over- seas. If the fuel doesn’t come from the U.S., it will come from South Africa or Australia or somewhere else, said Ebinger, at Brookings. The current best hope for cleaner Asian emissions is to effectively capture and store that carbon forever underground. But ener- gy experts say that process is prohibitively expensive. David Pumphrey, an energy expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the decision on coal exports ``will make no difference in the amount of coal China burns.’’ And Mike Davis, an energy expert at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, said arguing over which fuel is dirtiest isn’t helpful. Instead, governments should set hard clean-energy standards and let businesses figure out how to meet them, he said. That’s the way to draw research money and drive innovation to make things like coal cleaner, he added. march 30, 2011 The Portland Skanner Page 11
