Coal : keeping the lights on in America

Coal, its image notwithstanding, is not old-fashioned. It's just that most Americans have the luxury of ignoring it. More than half of America's electricity is supplied by coal. With the price of power sharply higher, the United States is likely to be relying on it for generations to come.

Coal played a vital role in shaping America over the past two centuries. It helped spread the American frontier westward, powering the new nation's railroads. By the early 1900s, the United States was a coal colossus. More than 700,000 men worked in the mines. Coal was the primary fuel for cooking and heating.

America's everyday familiarity with coal began to decline, as consumers and companies shifted to other types of fuel. By the 1990s, even the electricity business was looking beyond coal. The future would be charted with a new type of power plant, clean and cheap, run on natural gas. Between 1998 and 2002, the industry built scores of those plants. Now that the time has come to power up those plants, however, there's not nearly enough natural gas to run them and what there is costs seven times what it used to. Which brings us back to coal.

Today, utilities are planning 130 new coal-fired plants, and another 20 or so plants that rely on coal gasification, which turns solid coal into gas. The new coal-fired plants are cleaner than the old ones. But with debate raging over global warming, building scores of new plants is by no means a settled question. The nation's coal reserves could last 250 years, some experts say. Maybe longer. But given the world's rapidly rising energy needs, the struggle to protect the environment, and the costs of extracting coal, how long can we afford to continue ignoring its place?

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