Posted on 05/21/2026 10:11:14 AM PDT by Olog-hai
The world loves coal. That is the simple message from results showing new coal-fired power plants hit a global 10-year high in 2025, defying climate doomers who decry its use and long for wind farms, solar panels and hydro power everywhere.
Rising gas prices and supply disruptions linked to the Middle East crisis are just some of the factors pushing countries like China, Indonesia, India, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Italy to rely more heavily on dependable coal-fired energy security even as the global coal fleet generated less electricity – for now.
Overall coal power capacity — plants that came online or were commissioned — jumped 3.5 percent last year according to a report from Global Energy Monitor (GEM), which has tracked coal power for more than a decade, AFP reports.
The overwhelming majority of that — 95 percent — was in China and India, GEM said, with the U.S. also keenly embracing the power source under President Donald Trump who calls it “beautiful, clean coal,” as Breitbart News reported. …
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
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They won’t be built here but we can send the stuff o them. We got a lotta it. 400 years worth.
Red China is responsible for at least two-thirds of the pollutants we see in the air today.
Along with other Asian and ME countries ocean trash as well.
If Alaska were allowed to mine and export some of its huge coal reserves to Asia, the American trade deficit would diminish. There would be jobs and wealth as well.
Too much of Alaska’s coals are lignites or sub-bituminous. Too low of a BTU and too much crap to scrub when burned.
I remember stopping at a crossing last July in northern Idaho as a train of coal went by on the BNSF railroad.
I asked the customer I was visiting near there. He said one went by EVERYDAY heading to Tacoma from Wyoming.
To be loaded in Tacoma by ship to China.
There were two coal fired power plants scheduled to be built in North Az and south Utah as mine mouth plants. Neither were built on huge coal fields but Clinton locked down that area so no mining could be done.
The Page AZ plants could have run for decades on that but they now have been destroyed, same for plants at Farmington NM.
Obama wanted our local coal fired plant destroyed but it was so profitable the company put in billions of dollars of unnecessary equipment to upgrade it. Still running!
Led by the CCP — world leaders in fending off global warming.
Next time some TWOT nags about global CaCa just remind them that China is onto this.
ONE DATA CENTER PLANNED FOR N UTAH REQUIRES MORE POWER THAN THE ENTIRE STATE OF UTAH USES AS I TYPE THIS.
THE COAL TRAINS OUT OF WYOMING WILL BE DOUBLED SOON.
RODE THE PONY EXPRESS TRAIL IN 2001 ON HORSEBACK.
WEEKENDED IN MITCHELL, NEBRASKA.
COAL TRAINS CAME PAST THE FAIRGROUNDS EVERY 30 MINUTES-—LIKE CLOCKWORK. 2-3 ENGINES & 120 CARS....VERY CONSISTENT—W to E.
Where I live, traffic is often suspended by these coal trains; not enough bypasses at crossings. Some are really long,at least 1 engine each at front & rear, plus some more in the middle of the train. If you see one of these, you know you’ll be waiting at that crossing for awhile. So the railroads are doing a good business, even if they slow down everybody else’s business, as they go through the middle of towns. We see them loaded going east & empty back to the west.
This is the only coal that should be acceptable to build here and it still produces heavy metals in the PPM levels in its outgasses. Coal ash is still a toxic chemical substance with no decay time it’s chemically toxic forever unlike spend nuclear fuel which will eventually be harmless.
https://power.mhi.com/products/igcc
Or oxy fired and full gas capture no stack emissions allowed AT ALL. You still have to deal with the forever toxic ash which yes leaches from concrete eventually. So no spreading it all over the nation in concrete is not the answer it’s a cop out.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ef400484p
Why you say.
This is why.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304389424033326
Oh and retrofitting existing. Yeah about that.
Retrofitting a coal plant with an oxygen gasifier and a syngas heavy-metal scrubber is a massive capital investment (CapEx) estimated at ($2,000) to ($3,500) per kilowatt (kW). In contrast, retrofitting an existing boiler to burn natural gas is significantly cheaper—typically ranging from ($100) to ($250) /kW.
Gas is inherently cleaner it has zero heavy metals as is. Cheaper coal MMBTU does not close the gap when you must meet gas levels of clean, and we as a society demand any combustion to be as clean or cleaner than gas the benchmark to hit.
A 500 MW oxy-coal IGCC plant with heavy metal scrubbing but without carbon capture has an estimated levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of $75 to $95 per MWh. This relies on an estimated Overnight Capital Cost of $2,500 to $3,500/kW, primarily driven by the Air Separation Unit (ASU) and gasifier.
Cost Breakdown & VariablesCapital Cost (CAPEX): Represents 50-60% of your total MWh cost. While a standard Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) costs around $2,000/kW, the addition of an ASU for oxy-fuel burning combined with pre-combustion scrubbing tech pushes the capital requirements to about $1.5B–$1.75B for a 500 MW plant size.
Operating & Maintenance (O&M): Around $15 to $25/MWh. Scrubbing heavy metals (such as mercury, arsenic, and selenium) from the syngas requires specialized chemical sorbents (e.g., activated carbon beds) and wet scrubbers, increasing non-fuel operating costs.
Fuel Costs: Roughly $30 to $35/MWh. Because of the pure oxygen environment, the gasifier will yield a more concentrated syngas (H2) and (CO) with higher heating values compared to air-blown IGCC. This offsets some of the energy penalty used to run the oxygen plant.
Note: The exclusion of carbon capture and storage (CCS) avoids an additional 20-35% efficiency penalty and a $40–$60/MWh premium associated with capturing and compressing \(CO2)
$4 MMBTU gas delivered to a plant set the price floor for a turbine at $48/MWh just in fuel costs alone.
Solar and wind hit $10 or under on the regular in Texas on the ERCOT grid. They go negative about 20% of the time now too mostly at night or mid day sun peak.
BYD has 20foot iso sized batteries that do 10000+ cycles and hold 14.5MWh of energy the round trip levelized cost of storage LCOS of $14 per MWh.
This means you can firm up solar or wind for $14 per MWh charge at $10 and you have dispachable power at $24 MWh nothing touches this no thermal technology can touch this. Texas is getting 35,000MW of BESS because of this.
Ok one more tech that should be allowed here, some States have a ban on underground gasification.
Underground coal gasification (UCG) syngas production at the wellhead typically costs ($2.50) to ($4.50 MMBtu). After heavy metal, tar, and acid gas clean up, the upgraded, medium-BTU syngas costs ($3.50) to ($7.50MMBtu). When combusted in a gas turbine generator, this yields a levelized electricity cost of ($30) to (60 MWh).
Cost Breakdown
UCG costs are highly dependent on coal seam depth, thickness, and the chosen oxidant (air vs. pure oxygen).
• Wellhead Syngas Cost: ($2.50 to }$4.50MMBtu). This accounts for drilling well pairs, in-situ gasification, water management, and oxidant injection.
• Cleaned Syngas Cost: ($3.50 to $7.50 MMBtu). Post-gasification clean-up requires the removal of particulate matter, coal tars, heavy metals, and acid gases (like (H2), (CO), and (CO2) via standard processes (such as amine scrubbing or Rectisol). The required processing and thermal penalties during clean-up add roughly ($1.00) to ($3.00 MMBtu) to the initial wellhead production cost.
• Turbine Combustion & Power: ($30 to $60 MWh). Assuming a standard combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) heat rate of roughly (7.0 to 8.5 MMBtu/MWh) (accounting for the medium-to-low heating value of UCG syngas), the fuel cost converts to ($25 to $60 MWh) in fuel input. Once operations, maintenance, and capital recovery for the turbine island are added, the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) settles in the ($30 to $60 MWh) range.
Again compare this to solar & wind turned into dispatchable power with BESS systems like the BYD megapack LCOS $14 fundamentally changes the market price point when you can get at solar farm edge power for $5 or at turbine base of $5-10/MWh and just use the BESS to dispatch power at will 24/7 with 10000 cycle life a pack like that has a 27.7 year life cycling full DOD one per day that is one charge one full discharge per day.
Only tariffs keep that specific BYD pack at bay Tesla has access to the same LFP tech they use BYD cells themselves so a gigafactory here can and do crank them out. Tesla just sells them to homeowners at a huge markup.
Oops “Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) settles in the ($30 to $60 MWh) range.”
....Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) settles in the ($30 to $90 MWh) range.
Good to hear. It makes them more dependent on us when they think about Taiwan.
Not because I care about CO2 in the air , this would make for the cheapest form of industrial CO2 anywhere.
$26 per tonne you can get it down to $15 with turboexpanders recouping the compression energy.
Why do you want CO2 cheap?
To make synthetic fuels with ultra cheap wind and peak day solar when it’s under $10 MWh or negative power rates and your grid op is curtailing power. Don’t curtail it or go negative make synfuels with it.
Ethanol can be made in an electrochemical cell at 93% electrons to ethanol molecules with some of the other 7% in ethane gas and acetylene gas.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/anie.201706311
Ethanol needs 5.6kg of CO2 per gallon and 24kWh of electrons.
$26 per tonne=1000kg
(26/1000)*5.6= 14.5 cents worth of CO2
26.5kWh of electrons is needed electrons that would be lost if curtailed. At $10 per MWh this is
($10/1000)=$0.01 or 26.5 cents of electrons.
Raw material cost is therefore 41 cents per gallon. Capex , opex put it into the $1 range with 10% ROI investor’s expect.
This is cheaper than you can buy corn ethanol at the distillery let alone on the wholesale market.
Propane can also be made electrochemically again from CO2 water and electrons at 90% Faraday efficiency.
Either is perfect fuel for MCCI engines that’s diesels to the non-scientists, Clearflame will convert your Cummins for you and every diesel can mist propane into the intake and use the idle setting to light it off as a “liquid speak plug”
Spark engines also can run on E100 they do it in Brazil all day every day. With a fairly simple gas injection tube just after the MAF sensor a regular gasoline engine can burn propane or gasoline/E100 bifuel set up.
https://www.iit.edu/news/closing-carbon-cycle-green-propane-production
The grid need to fundamentally reversed from a demand grid to a supply grid.
The grid should say this is what I can give you use all of it, not just trying to chase a phase angle and sync frequency aka demand chasing.
I didn’t include water in the above calcs because....
To produce one US gallon of ethanol (C2H5OH) electrochemically from (CO2) with a 93% Faradaic efficiency using boron-doped nanodiamonds, you would need approximately 0.84 gallons of water for the chemical reaction alone. At 2026 wholesale industrial water rates, this water is worth approximately $0.0028 (roughly 1/4 of a penny).
Propane is similar in water use and costs.
I should point out that just in the distillery alone you need 4 gallons of water for mash formation and distillation alone vs 0.84 gal all in for electrochemical ethanol.
This says nothing of growing the corn to take the grain from for that gallon of ethanol.
Oh yeah buddy.
It takes anywhere from 700 to 800 gallons of water to grow the corn required to make a single gallon of ethanol, largely depending on whether the corn is rain-fed or irrigated.
The exact amount of water varies drastically depending on local growing conditions, climate, and farming practices:
National Average (Irrigated Corn): Studies from the USDA and the American Coalition for Ethanol (ACE) estimate that when corn is irrigated, it requires about 785 gallons of water to produce the crop feedstock for one gallon of ethanol.
Rain-Fed Corn (Lower Water Footprint): Over 70-90% of the field corn used for ethanol isn’t artificially irrigated at all and relies entirely on natural rainfall. In these regions, the crop’s “blue water” irrigation footprint is practically zero.
Dry Climates (Higher Water Footprint): In more arid farming regions (such as the Northern Plains), relying heavily on irrigation can require upwards of 300 to 2,600 gallons of water just to grow the corn needed for a single gallon of ethanol.
All of this ^^
Or 0.84 gallons of H20 and 5.6kg of CO2 from coal stacks and 25 ish kWh from a wind turbine or solar panel.
Yeah let’s do the electrochemical way and stop the farm welfare program that is draining aquifers and sending topsoil down the Mississippi River into the Gulf and making a giant deadzone.
There’s a coal-fired plant about five miles from my home. I can see the stacks off in the distance when I drive into town.
The EPA calls it a “fossil plant.” I guess that means they manufacture trilobites. It’s been updated to “High-efficiency low-emissions” technology in this century.
In the winter, you used to be able to tell how cold it was by how much steam the stacks were belching out. Now there’s never anything visible coming out. Never. They claim it emits 85% less nitrogen oxides, 95% less sulfur dioxides, and 99% less particulates than the old system. Which is a YUGE reduction, and it makes about 5 million mWh a year to boot.
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