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Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray weighed in on the increasing amount of regulations on the coal industry, President Obama and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s support of green energies.
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“Why she is supporting the elimination of coal is she’s getting millions and millions of dollars from the manufacturers of windmills and solar panels. That electricity costs 26 cents a kilowatt hour, coal-fired electricity costs four cents. It gets four cents a kilowatt hour, the wind and solar, from the government, the taxpayer. So she is getting a lot of kickback into her campaign and into the Clinton Foundation from the makers of windmills and solar panels – it’s called crony capitalism.
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Murray explained that it has been difficult keeping up with all the new regulations under the Obama Administration.
“The regulations are coming out faster from the Obama Administration than we can read them. In the last five years, the U.S. EPA alone [has published] 38 times the words in our Holy Bible.”
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“The coal industry is virtually destroyed. There are 52 bankrupt coal companies, there are only four of us that are not – 140,000 [miners have been let go]. We had 200,000 miners before Obama, we now have 60,000.
Just wanted to highlight an Obama "success" story. Seems like his successes always cost Americans something.
Good. Glad to hear that the use of coal is phasing out in the US economy. They are still burning it en mass in China. There were plans to ship coal to my city on the coast so it could be put on ships headed for the Asian market - China I believe. They don't have an EPA over there. Google air pollution in China. Anyway, City Council voted it down. They'll probably just find another local port.
I opened your link and that site is an opinion site. It appeared to be conjecture and not much substance. They should have fact checked that Clinton is really receiving millions from green energy companies and posted the exact regulations that the EPA have created and how they are specifically connected to Obama. TBH, I wouldn't use this article as a basis for a well informed opinion or, dare I say, basis of fact.
What you also are ignoring is that while coal jobs are declining solar jobs are booming. There are now four times as many solar workers than coal workers. Thanks Obama!
I keep hearing this from the uniformed yet a few months back those in the solar industry were claiming they would all go bankrupt if the federal subsidy was not renewed. So which is it?
Solar cannot and will never compete coal or other fossil fuels, period, end of story. Because of the cost, capacity and storage issues it's a supplementary fuel and that is all it will ever be.
This is the threshold you need to meet. It's January in the Northeast when the sun comes about 7 and sets by 5. It's cloudy, it's below 0 degrees and is going to stay like that for 2 weeks. Utilities are hitting record breaking consumption at night. How are you going to fulfill that demand with solar? Bahahaha
Last edited by thecoalman; 07-20-2016 at 07:45 PM..
The coal industry these days is not for personal home use but for business and manufacturing plants. My husband works in a coke plant that produces foundry coke for Chevy, steel companies ect. When he was 1st hired 35 yrs ago there were dozens of plants - but through the years due to increasing regulations and the fact that China has taken over the coke and steel markets even though their product is substandard - there is only a handful. He's hoping that his plant will continue to be open until he retires.
Exactly coal isn't just to generate electricity or heat it is used by manufacturing in the form of coke but you can't tell these liberal knotheads anything...
I grew up in a coal-fired home and near a coal-fired plant, admittedly in the days before now required stack scrubbers. Coal was immensely dirty even inside a home, and keeping the stoker filled was a pain, especially if an absence of more than several days was planned, letting alone removing and disposing of clinkers and other ashes. We used to store a winter's supply of coal in a 10 by 10 room, later repurposed when we switched to natural gas.
Nobody in their right mind would burn coal today to heat their homes if they had natural gas available at current prices. I'm not certain about propane, but I believe there is a glut of it as well. Burning fuel oil also is dirty, but relatively hassle-free compared to coal.
If you saw anthracite in action you'd have a different opinion. Carbon content is about 90%, no soot, very little sulfur smell and since you mentioned clinkers it burns up to powder. It's the volatile or non carbon content that causes the clinkers in soft coal. It's about 5 to 10 percent ash depending on the vein, a bushel can be feather light with the highest grades of anthracite and the right appliance.
For the benefit of others a clinker is when the the non combustible material in coal fuses together, looks like a chunk of lava and has to be removed by hand.
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Coal isn't even mentioned in this EIA home heating fuel statistical report.
I can only make guesstimates but it's probably half a million homes. I'm basing that on output and what I would expect the average home to use. Another thing that is going to skew any official numbers is that many people keep their gas or oil and it's still listed as their primary heat, in reality the coal is the primary heat.
1. We cannot use coal forever, it is a diminishing resource where solar and wind technology can provide near unlimited resources.
While it's finite resource the supply might be 200 years, as a practical matter we will have moved away from coal in that time. Solar and wind will be blip on the timeline of history, geothermal or some other source like fusion which can provide base power will win out.
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3. I like having a near zero electric bill. I don't know where you get $1300.
You're doing that on the backs of other taxpayers. Do you get a REC? Then you are doing it on the backs or other ratepayers too.
For decades the coal-fired plants on the interior side of the Appalachian mountains would send their air pollution over to the carolinas, causing ecological damage to our region. We could never do anything about it, because environmental laws were put in the hands of states -- and legislators in PA, Ohio and WV, for instance, only care about the finances of their constituents, not the environmental impacts to other states.
So as far as I'm concerned, "coal country" deserved what it got.
I understand your concern, for example NJ was suing PA over this. I have a very simple solution for this. Any electricity being exported from a state like PA into states like NJ that do not produce enough of their own power will have an environmental impact fee assessed on NJ residents and business's. We'll do the same thing with the coal or natural gas being exported from PA to feed NJ's own power plants. Certainly you would agree that PA residents should be compensated for the environmental damage being done in PA because of consumption in NJ.
As I documented, and as analysts have repeatedly concluded, low natural gas prices have crippled the coal industry.
There is no single factor here, it's many of them. If you build a new billion dollar coal plant it's going to be decades before it makes money. It's very risky venture considering the uncertainties of future regulations, in particular those for CO2.
The interview is out of context. It appears to be Obama when perhaps he was a senator talking about carbon taxes.
There are no carbon taxes today, none on the horizon. Whatever Obama has said is somewhat irrelevant to the current cost of generating electricity in the U.S. using either coal or natural gas.
Yet coal use in electricity has fallen to coal's much higher heat rate (which you have never mentioned in this thread) than modern combined cycle generation plants, the higher transportation costs of coal, especially as natural gas production has ratcheted up in the very low cost Marcellus and Utica sands in OH, PA, WV, etc., and the very low historical prices of natural gas.
Additionally, it's much easier to build cost-efficient natural gas plants close to demand, lowering transmission costs.
I'll attempt to provide links explaining all of this in a subsequent post.
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Carbon content is about 90%, no soot, very little sulfur smell and since you mentioned clinkers it burns up to powder. It's the volatile or non carbon content that causes the clinkers in soft coal. It's about 5 to 10 percent ash depending on the vein, a bushel can be feather light with the highest grades of anthracite and the right appliance. 
