Is Peabody Coal lying to America?

By Jim Roth | Phillips Murrah P.C. | The Journal Record

[ MAY 11, 2009 - OKLAHOMA CITY, OK ] - This past week I spent several days in our nation’s capital, where the legislative session was seemingly in high gear. With that reality there should be a cautionary note about what one reads or hears disseminating out of Washington. We have all grown a bit accustomed to thinking that Beltway debates can stretch the truth, but I was surprised by one ad from America’s largest private-sector coal company.

The ad was “clean green coal.”

Yes, you read that right.

America’s largest coal company is claiming its product can be better than wind, better than natural gas and better than nuclear energy.

Maybe pigs could fly faster than jets, too. It would be nice if we could prove that they could even fly at all.

This full-page ad was in last week’s Politico Newspaper, perhaps the most cutting-edge publication that reveals the intricacies of how our government and politics operate on a day-to-day basis. Many Washington decision makers read it and act/react based upon what they learn.

I further understand that the same ad ran recently in Roll Call, the newspaper covering Congress and read by every member, every day. I am hopeful they take this ad, and others like it, with serious skepticism. I suspect there were ads that claimed cigarettes were good for you, if we could just put a filter on ’em. It seems to be a fitting analogy to the cost and health uncertainties of a carbon “filter” on an old coal plant.

The ad went on to claim that coal, with carbon capture and storage (CCS), is the “low cost, low carbon option.”

Peabody’s ad makes the claim that coal-fired power plants, even when equipped with as-yet unproven and therefore uncosted capture-and-sequestration technology, will be 15-50 percent cheaper than wind, 28 percent cheaper than natural gas, and 15 percent cheaper than nuclear. And with less carbon.

The problem? There are no accurate, verifiable financial estimates, anywhere, about the enormous task/cost of capturing and storing carbon from coal, which is in fact America’s largest single source of pollution. “Low Cost?” Low, or no, proof at this point.

Plus their ad fails to mention the menace of coal ash and its likely new regulation as a hazard. Where are those cost estimates to be borne by the utility ratepayer?

In response to this ad, the Sierra Club recently restated the California Public Utility Commission’s financial comparisons, which were made PUBLIC, as: A recent California PUC study estimated that wind would cost 9 cents per kilowatt hour delivered; coal, with capture and storage, would cost 17 cents; combined cycle natural gas power would cost 9.4 cents; geothermal, 10 cents; concentrating solar, 12 cents; and nuclear, 15 cents. A wide variety of other analyses have shown that coal, if you have to capture its carbon, simply doesn’t compete – except maybe with nuclear.

For Oklahoma’s sake, I sure like the outcome of California’s public research: Oklahoma’s clean-burning natural gas and its abundant wind potential are the cleanest and cheapest forms of electricity generation available for America’s future in a carbon-constrained world.

I hope our congressional delegation goes to bat for us and calls out the massive “clean coal” ad campaign for the distortion that it is. Oklahoma’s role in America’s energy future is only limited by whether the truth prevails.

This is an enormous issue for our country to sort out, as the impact of carbon and climate change on the world around us is perhaps one of the greatest challenges of our respective lifetimes. It’s a challenge made more difficult by expensive, misleading ad campaigns distorting today’s reality and tomorrow’s probability.

Carbon fuels account for 80 percent of the world’s global energy supply and coal accounts for 25 percent of this supply and is expected to continually play a significant role in power generation. In fact, America gets almost 50 percent of its electricity from coal. This is perhaps why even President Obama, a champion of clean energy, campaigned about the promise of “clean coal.” His assertions on the campaign trail are not yet proving an affordable, technological reality.

Instead, today’s natural gas producers, wind developers and geothermal technicians are doing more to provide Americans with clean, green, affordable energy than anyone else. Period.

And that’s the truth.

Jim Roth, a former Oklahoma corporation commissioner, is an attorney with Phillips Murrah P.C. in Oklahoma City, where his practice focuses on clean, green energy for Oklahoma.