Fantastic news.
Bigger picture, I wish nobody was making electricity from natural gas. It is FAR FAR more valuable as a feedstock for petrochemical products, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and fertilizer. You can burn coal to make power (and use a little bit of gas for peaking). But you can’t use coal to make petrochemical products (at least without massive investment in the Fischer–Tropsch process to liquify coal).
The Germans ran their WW II war machine on coal liquefaction. Sasol in South Africa was formed in 1950 to liquify coal using Fischer-Tropsch that German chemists and engineers first developed in the early 1900s.
In a sane world, hydrocarbons would be stacked according to their highest value application:
1. Coal for power.
2. Petroleum for transportation.
3. Natural Gas for feedstocks.
The even bigger picture is that we can use thorium (found in coal) to power reactors, and use some of the heat produced in the reactors to liquify coal using the Fischer–Tropsch process. The thorium in coal has something like a dozen times the amount of energy (if burned in a reactor) as burning the coal itself, and the best part is that we basically throw away the thorium right now. We operated a thorium plant using molten salt to transfer the heat, in the 1960s, and it worked fine then (in fact, they shut the reactor down on Friday afternoons, and started it back up on Monday mornings, that’s how reliable it is). Further, because of the nature of thorium reactions, it is virtually impossible to build nuclear weapons from the products that the reactor makes, so it is as safe as could be from that standpoint. With 60+ years of technological progress, it would work at least as well right now. Oh, yeah, and we have so much coal that we could literally provide for all of our electrical power needs, and our liquid petroleum needs, just from this one source for hundreds of years into the future. That’s just with known coal reserves, without any new discoveries, without traditional nuclear and without oil or natural gas, let alone anything from solar or wind or geothermal.
Read the following blog piece from nearly 15 years ago to see a detailed explanation of what we could do, and the amount of energy that we have, just in coal: https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2491667