Free Republic

When it comes to coal, the United States is what the Middle East is for oil. That fact is not lost on an industry competing for relevancy at a time when it’s undersold by natural gas and renewable energy. It’s not lost on the coal-producing towns in the nation that have long relied on the mineral for jobs and economic development. And it’s certainly not lost on Greg Merle, whose company is pitching what he hopes — what he believes — might just be the answer for a declining industry desperate to remain viable. Merle is the president of Riverview...

The Trump administration on Wednesday eased rules for handling toxic coal ash from more than 400 U.S. coal-fired power plants after utilities pushed back against regulations adopted under former President Barack Obama. Environmental Protection Agency acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the changes would save utilities roughly $30 million annually. The move represents the latest action by Trump’s EPA to boost the struggling coal industry by rolling back environmental and public health protections enacted under his predecessor. It pushes back the deadline to close problematic ash dumps and gives state regulators flexibility in how they deal with the massive waste piles...

President Trump...is increasingly putting his finger on the scale to help once-iconic industries that are declining as a share of the American economy, at the expense of some of the country’s fastest-growing sectors. The president’s attempts to boost domestic steel manufacturing and coal mining have come largely through policies that limit foreign competition, like tariffs, and proposals to prevent coal-fired power plants from closing. Those efforts have produced only modest job gains so far in two blue-collar sectors that Mr. Trump championed in his run to the White House. But they have injected uncertainty into a host of other growing...

It seems Pope Francis has learned little since his 2015 encyclical calling on the world to fight climate change by limiting the use of modern technologies and fossil fuels. He called many of the world’s leading oil companies to the carpet last week in a meeting he “requested” (anyone who says no to a meeting with the pope risks alienating many of the world’s estimated 1.3 billion Catholics) with the companies’ top executives. Francis called on the oil companies to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, to save the Earth. In a column written when Francis issued his...

BECKLEY, W.Va. (WSAZ) -- More coal jobs are coming to West Virginia. Bluestone Coal has announced it is hiring 250 employees, adding to its staff and providing high paying jobs at mines across southern West Virginia. According to a news release from the company, Bluestone is now producing at a level that requires additional workers. “We need both surface and deep mine workers,” Company CEO Jay Justice said. “All positions, ranging from foremen to mechanics, electricians, truck drivers and all types of equipment operators will be put to work as soon as possible.” A variety of jobs are being offered,...

One Trump Administration achievement has been liberating U.S. energy producers of all kinds from federal shackles. Companies have responded with jobs and investment, but all of a sudden the Administration wants to do a Barack Obama imitation and play energy favorites. The National Security Council on Friday reviewed a 41-page internal memo, leaked to Bloomberg News, suggesting that President Trump invoke emergency authority to require grid operators to buy nuclear and coal power. But there’s no emergency, and the political intervention will do more harm than good. *** The supposed problem is that the U.S. is producing an abundance of...

.S. President Donald Trump on Friday directed Energy Secretary Rick Perry to take emergency steps to keep at-risk coal and nuclear plants running, the White House announced. Under the directive, Perry would require grid operators to buy electricity from ailing nuclear and coal-fired power plants to keep them from being shuttered. “Unfortunately, impending retirements of fuel-secure power facilities are leading to a rapid depletion of a critical part of our nation’s energy mix, and impacting the resilience of our power grid,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said in a statement.

In another jab to President Trump's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head, actor and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) labeled Scott Pruitt the worst EPA administrator of all time. "I pay no attention to what he says. He cannot be taken seriously," Schwarzenegger said at the R20 Austrian World Summit, an annual climate conference he hosts in his home country. "He's the worst Environmental secretary that we have ever had." Schwarzenegger went on to criticize Pruitt for his ties to oil and gas companies. “He's doing the bidding for the oil companies and the coal companies," the 70-year-old Republican told...

When the Commission to Assess the Threat from Electromagnetic Pulse [EMP] Attack published its report in 2004, coal accounted for roughly half of all power produced in the United States. Today, only a third of US electricity comes from coal, according to the US Energy Information Agency (EIA). This is good news for both environmentalists and natural gascompanies. The formers’ long term dream of a more sustainable source of power is being realized, while the latters’ business is booming. According to the EIA report, natural gas now makes up a third of all power produced – with nuclear and renewables...

Three months after announcing it would completely eliminate coal from its portfolio, Detroit-based utility DTE Energy announced on Friday it, along with partner Consumers Energy, was accelerating plans to increase its clean-energy portfolio to reach a generation target of at least 50% by 2030. The utility’s announcement came on the same day President Donald J. Trump tweeted that the United States has 250 years of “clean coal” in its energy mix and touted the fact he ended the mythical “war on coal.”

After years in limbo, a plan to construct a new coal plant has been scrapped. That leaves Ohio without any proposals for new coal-power generation. Environmental groups see this as a critical turning point.Since the early 2000s, the Lima energy plant has been on again and off again. But now the company behind the project is officially bowing out. Neil Waggoner with the Beyond Coal campaign says it’s clear coal is near its end. “We see there are no coal plants under consideration to be built. The current coal plants that are already in the state are struggling to be...

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans on repealing an Obama-era requirement effectively mandating all new coal-fired power plants be outfitted with unproven emissions technology, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned. EPA will modify the New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for power plants as part of its effort to repeal the Clean Power Plan (CPP) — the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s climate agenda. EPA will drop the de facto requirement that new coal plants install carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology Obama administration critics said would make it nearly impossible to build new coal plants. “It’s fantastic that the...

To put this story into context, let's go back to 1899 and the publication of Johann von Bloch's book Die Zukunft des Krieges (The Future of War). Bloch was a 19th-century railway magnate who had built the Warsaw to Moscow railway. In those days, the best and the brightest worked on optimizing the productivity of railroads through operational analysis. Bloch applied insights from managing railroads to theorizing about the conduct of war. His big insight, original at the time, was that wars would be won by the country with the biggest industrial output. This is the same as the Soviet...

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has proposed to end the longstanding EPA practice of using secretive, often questionable, questionable, even deceptive science to support agency policy and regulatory initiatives. His proposed rules will ensure that any science underlying agency actions is transparent and publicly available for independent experts to examine and validate – or point out its flaws. It also responds to growing concerns that extensive scientific research in environmental, medical and other arenas cannot be replicated by other scientists, or is compromised by cherry-picked data, poor research design, sloppy analysis or biased researchers. The situation has led to...

Windmills use an enormous amount of copper. For example, a single wind turbine can contain 335 tons of steel, 4.7 tons of copper, 3 tons of aluminum and 700-plus pounds of rare earth minerals. ... In fact, wind and solar energy use more copper than conventional forms of energy, such as coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. Conventional power plants require about one ton of copper to produced one megawatt of electricity, whereas wind and solar can require between three to five tons per megawatt. ... Make no mistake, switching from reliable sources of electricity like coal, natural gas,...

The Redbank Power Station in Australia was shut down in 2014, but it’s being reactivated for the sole purpose of providing power to cryptocurrency mining. Local power company Hunter Energy agreed to reactivate the plant for the Australian tech company IOT Group and sell it power at wholesale prices for blockchain applications, CNET reported. Cryptocurrency such as bitcoin uses blockchain to secure transactions and mine new coins. However, cryptocurrency mining uses huge amounts of power, with current estimates indicated it uses as much power as the entire country of Singapore.IOT plans to offer the power to other companies using blockchain...

Enzymatic liquid membrane design and mechanism of carbon dioxide capture and separation. The Sandia/University of New Mexico membrane is fabricated by formation of 8-nanometer diameter mesopores. Using atomic layer deposition and oxygen plasma processing, the silica mesopores are engineered to be hydrophobic except for an 18-nm-deep region at the pore surface which is hydrophilic. Through capillary condensation, carbonic anhydrase enzymes and water spontaneously fill the hydrophilic mesopores to form an array of stabilized enzymes with an effective concentration greater than 10 times of that achievable in solution. These catalyze the capture and dissolution of carbon dioxide at the upstream surface...

DOE: If it weren’t for coal-fired electricity plants, the Northeast would have blacked-out during recent bomb-cyclone From the Daily Caller: Coal-fired power plants kept the lights on for millions of Americans during January’s bomb cyclone, according to an Energy Department report warning future plant retirements could imperil grid security. Energy analysts at DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory found that coal power kept the lights on for millions of Americans during the bomb cyclone that pummeled the eastern U.S. from late December to early January. NETL analysts found that coal plants made up most of the incremental power utilities relied on...

Rural residents turn to cheap heating fuel ... Monte Miller shovels a load of coal into a bucket and makes the short journey from his storage shed to his home on the edge of Bayfield, joking aloud that his wife likes to keep the temperature at a steady 75 degrees. “But we don’t have any problem doing that with coal,” Miller and his wife, Marsha, have been using coal as their main source of fuel since they moved to their home in 2000. Each year, the couple uses about 2 tons of coal to keep their 2,500-square-foot house warm throughout...

The Car Dyke is an eighty mile artificial water channel, thought to have been constructed by the Romans from the first century AD... The Dyke runs along the western edge of the fens from the River Cam near Cambridge all the way to the River Witham, just south of Lincoln. Many stretches are protected as a scheduled ancient monument... William Stukeley... came up with the idea that Car Dyke was a canal... to supply the Roman Armies of the north with grain and food from Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire with drainage as a secondary function, a view which still perpetuates until...