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Dumpers with black gold pass through the checkpoint "Butane" and Donetsk. Russia steals a Ukrainian coal ukrainepress.ru Observation mission of the Organization for security and cooperation in Europe, which is based on the Russian border crossings "Gukovo" and Donetsk in the Rostov region, said that continues to record the facts export to Russia of coal of Donbass. The weekly report of the Mission for the period from 18 to 25 March, UNIAN reports. "The Observer Mission has continued to monitor the dump trucks that transport coal from Luhansk oblast in the Russian Federation through the border pass" Gukovo, "the statement...

An environmental review of a proposed Washington coal port will be delayed until 2017, one year after the analysis was scheduled to be completed. The delay comes after the project's developer, SSA Marine, submitted an updated plan for the Gateway Pacific Terminal to the U.S. Corps of Army Engineers. SSA Marine acquired more land in the area of the proposed dock and reconfigured its site plan, said Bob Watters, a company executive. The move will reduce the project's overall footprint by 17 percent and its impact on wetlands by 49 percent, he said. "From an environmental standpoint, we thought it...

Despite mounting protests, Japan continues to finance the building of coal-fired power plants with money earmarked for fighting climate change, with two new projects underway in India and Bangladesh, The Associated Press has found. The AP reported in December that Japan had counted $1 billion in loans for coal plants in Indonesia as climate finance, angering critics who say such financing should be going to clean energy like solar and wind power. Japanese officials now say they are also counting $630 million in loans for coal plants in Kudgi, India, and Matarbari, Bangladesh, as climate finance. The Kudgi project has...

The future for the coal industry is looking “increasingly bleak,” according to an investor’s note from Macquarie Research. The analysis firm also said that “a wave of bankruptcies” appear to be just over the horizon as coal mining companies deal with mounting debt and a shrinking market. The coal markets have collapsed in spectacular fashion over the last few years due to a perfect storm of factors. U.S. coal producers first had to compete ferociously with shale gas in America’s electric power sector as fracking took off about a decade ago. That forced an array of coal plants to shut...

WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has begun an aggressive campaign to block President Obama’s climate change agenda in statehouses and courtrooms across the country, arenas far beyond Mr. McConnell’s official reach and authority. The campaign of Mr. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is aimed at stopping a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations requiring states to reduce carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. Once enacted, the rules could shutter hundreds of coal-fired plants in what Mr. Obama has promoted as a transformation of the nation’s energy economy away from fossil...

resident Obama has found himself at odds with his old law school mentor over the Environmental Protection Agency. Laurence Tribe, a liberal constitutional scholar at Harvard University, told House lawmakers that EPA carbon dioxide regulations are tearing the Constitution apart. “EPA possesses only the authority granted to it by Congress,” Tribe told lawmakers in a hearing Tuesday. “Its gambit here raises serious questions under the separation of powers… because EPA is attempting to exercise lawmaking power that belongs to Congress and judicial power that belongs to the federal courts.” “Burning the Constitution should not become part of our national energy...

Energy companies are preparing to shut down nearly 16 gigawatts of power by the end of this year as the deadline for compliance with new federal environmental regulations looms. In total, some 85 coal-fired generating units at 36 locations are expected to close in the coming months in part because of Environmental Protection Agency regulations. The largest set of retirements is set for June, when electricity demand starts to peak as Americans turn on their air conditioners for the summer. Most of these retirements will come from coal-fired power plants in Appalachia. “We are currently showing nearly 300 GW of...

The Clean Power Plan is really about no power or far more costly power in those states where the EPA has been shutting down coal-fired plants that not long ago provided fifty percent of all the electricity in the nation. The folks at the Environmental Protection Agency, starting with a long line of its administrators that now includes Gina McCarthy, think you and the Congress of the United States are stupid. They have been telling lies for so long they can’t imagine that their chokehold on the American economy will ever end. It is, however, coming to an end and...

Mesa County commissioners have thrown their first jab in a growing fight against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the department’s decision last November to list the Gunnison sage-grouse as a threatened species. Commissioners on Monday approved and signed a notice of intent to sue the federal government for listing the Gunnison sage-grouse as threatened and for designating a critical habitat for the bird in western Colorado and eastern Utah. The notice of intent to sue claims the listings are improper because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service noted the Gunnison sage-grouse population in the Gunnison Basin is “stable...

While the nation’s capital is in the single digits, Americans more than ever want policies that promote affordable and reliable energy. Although this country has abundant energy options, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and President Obama have once again engaged in an energy policy that eschews reason by picking industry winners and losers. In this case, the real loser is sadly the American consumer who may be forced into higher utility costs and less reliable sources of energy.Contrary to the President and the EPA, regulations that eliminate American coal are the wrong policies introduced at the worst possible time. According...

An activist who was using his position on Colorado’s oil and gas task force to push for a New York-style ban on oil and natural gas development has given up on the fringe proposal for lack of support, according to documents released by state officials overnight. The proposal’s demise is yet another defeat for national anti-fracking groups in Colorado, such as Food and Water Watch and the Sierra Club, which are desperately trying to reboot their failed campaign for an effective statewide oil and gas development ban. It’s also a reminder of how outside of New York, the “ban fracking”...

Since economies drive commodity prices, not the other way around, the collapse in oil is more of a demand issue than it appears, said Stephen Schork, founder and editor of The Schork Report newsletter. The influential oil analyst told CNBC on Friday that there's an "absolute glut" in crude, but the demand side of the equation can't be overlooked. "When you have such a sharp fall in commodity prices, that's because of economic demand. And I think that's a very worrisome telltale." "Oil prices are the canary in the coal mine," Schork said in a "Squawk Box" interview. "I don't...

On Monday, the West Virginia Public Service Commission (PSC) approved the siting certificate for Moundsville Power LLC to construct a 549-MW combined cycle natural gas power plant in Marshall County. It will be the first to also burn ethane. The company is also touting the project’s role in helping to offset the effect of area coal plant closings. With the PSC approval in hand, Moundsville Power’s next step is financing. Construction is scheduled to begin in late 2015, and the plant is expected to be operational in early 2018. The Moundsville Power facility will be a wholesale generator for the...

Mesa County commissioners on Tuesday directed Mesa County Attorney Patrick Coleman to draft a notice of intent to sue the federal government over the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s listing of the Gunnison sage-grouse as a threatened species. Gunnison County filed its own notice of intent in December to bring civil action against the Fish and Wildlife Service for, the county believes, improperly listing the bird as a threatened species and naming Gunnison County and acreage in a handful of other Colorado and Utah counties, including Mesa, as critical habitat for the sage-grouse. Mesa County decided to follow with its...

On the banks of the Illinois River, about 60 miles west of the state capital in Springfield, an old coal-fired power plant sits waiting for its future to arrive. First opened in 1948, it's been dormant since 2011, when its owner, St. Louis-based Ameren, shut down the plant rather than retrofit it to meet federal standards. Last year workers came to give it a makeover. Using almost $1 billion in stimulus money, the project was supposed to become the poster child for clean-coal technology. Rather than spewing into the sky, the carbon dioxide produced as the plant burned coal would...

Coal is a small part of Colorado’s economy as a whole, but nearly half of the statewide industry is based in far northwest Colorado, where it helps boost average household income higher than the average for the state as a whole. ... While coal mining directly accounts for 4.6 percent of the region’s total employees, at 1,545 jobs, it makes up more than 17 percent of the region’s total economic output, says the report, by Broomfield economist Gary Horvath. Another 571 people are directly employed in the region’s electrical power generation industry, which is supplied by locally generated coal, and...

Only sixteen percent of blacks in the sprawling South African township of Soweto, Johannesburg, pay for their electricity, while South Africa’s electricity supply infrastructure is rapidly crumbling due to incompetent Third World management and lack of maintenance. The situation is so dire that local media have now reported that the government has been briefed on emergency measures in the event of a total national electricity blackout. The extent of the problem was graphically revealed when late last year, shock photographs—taken in secret by one of the employees of the state-run Electricity Supply Commission (Eskom)—were leaked of one of the country’s...

The Obama administration has shut down a Bush administration federal project aimed at demonstrating “clean coal” technology. The $1.7 billion FutureGen 2.0 project was meant to build a coal-fired power plant in Illinois that captures carbon and pumps it underground. Congress authorized $1.1 billion toward the project in 2009 as a continuation of a 2003 project Bush proposed. “The U.S. Department of Energy has directed the suspension of FutureGen 2.0 project development activities,” Ken Humphreys, head of the public-private FutureGen Alliance developing the plant, said in a Tuesday statement. “The DOE has concluded that there is insufficient time to complete...

A former Environmental Protection Agency regulator warns that while the Obama administration now has coal in its crosshairs, natural gas is next in line. David Schnare cites a proposed rule on methane emissions as one of the ways President Obama and the EPA will clamp down on natural gas. The 33-year EPA veteran, who once sued utilities for coal-fired plants that didn’t meet Clean Air Act standards, is director of the Center of Energy and Environmental Stewardship at the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. Schnare said the EPA — as part of its “Clean Power Plan” rule that would...

If you’re like most Americans, you’re enjoying the fact that it costs a lot less to fill up your car’s gas tank these days. If you’re a fan of big government, you may feel a bit ambivalent, though. Why? Because one of the biggest drivers behind the drop in gas prices is the rise in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) here at home. While the government is busy micromanaging the energy industry — trying to saddle it with more regulations while showering favors on so-called “green” companies — the free market is showing how to actually get things done....