[Conservative Vermont Vet]

"This story has been repeated over and over but I don’t completely buy it. We have > 400 years of clean coal in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, meeting the New Source Performance Standards of the Clean Air Act. There more clean coal in the Hanna Basin of Montana. Technology will catch up with the high sulfur reserves; Fluized Bed Boilers can use Illinois and West KY high sulfur coal.

If so, why are we now "importing" as much as 4% of our needs?

Though many reasons including cheaper prices in some countries, this should not even be an issue and we should be exporting instead

See: The Great Coal Grab:

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/gue/2007/1118.html

"The US is often called the Saudi Arabia of coal. And there’s a good reason for that: The nation has more than 27 percent of the world’s known coal reserves and some of the highest-quality deposits in the world. That’s 90 billion metric tons more than Russia, the nation with the second-largest reserves.

"With a resource so vast, it may come as a surprise that the US isn’t a major player in the global coal trade. After all, the nation ranks only seventh in terms of coal exports, exporting less than 20 percent as much as Australia, the world’s largest coal exporter. In fact, US coal exports have been declining steadily since the late 1980s

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Location probably has something to do with it. Australia ships coal to Asian customers that were formerly ours. We’re also burning more here.