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COAL'S FUTURE -- Conversion process holds promise for jobs, environment, national security.
The Patriot News --
EDITORIALS/COMMENTS
Monday March 16, 1998
Pennsylvania continues to struggle with the consequences of it's one-time role as the nation's
largest source of energy.
Acid damage from long-abandoned coal mines continues to pollute our streams. Thousands of
acres covered with open pits and piles of culm are both unusable and dangerous in their present state.
Thousands of homes and businesses are at a risk of subsidence or flooding from underground mines.
Hundreds of communities have seen their life blood sucked out by the demise of "King Coal".
But the coal industry, even in the especially hard-hit anthracite region of northeast Pennsylvania,
isn't so much down and out as it is in a pause between its dirty past and its relatively clean future.
And strange as it may seem, a revival of the coal industry could be the key to finally dealing on a
large scale with the leftover problems from the coal industry of old.
Such a revival is only a matter of time. There is just too much energy locked away in the coal
seams of Pennsylvania for an energy-intensive world to ignore forever.
Whether that day is sooner or later has a lot to do with how lawmakers in Harrisburg and
Washington respond to a plan to use coal waste in a state-of-the-art clean-fuel, coal
gasification/liquefaction process.
As explained by John Rich Jr. whose family owns major mining operations in Schuylkill County,
a $300 million facility he proposes to build in West Mahanoy Twp. would convert 2,500 tons of
anthracite waste a day into 5,000 barrels of ultra-clean diesel fuel. It would employ technology similar
to that long used in South Africa to convert coal to oil.
Rich notes that Schuylkill County, which has the largest coal reserves of any county, sits on the
equivalent of 19 billion barrels of oil, nearly 60 percent more than the 12 billion barrels estimated to
be in Alaska's North Slope.
Rich's scheme to exploit this resource would have many benefits. It would commercially test a
technology of great potential, not only for other parts of Pennsylvania, but for other coal areas of
the United States and the world. It would mean jobs: 1,000 in construction and 150 permanently for
the prototype plant. It would recycle culm and the land it left useless.
And it would create an ultra-clean fuel (with zero sulfur and zero nitrogen) that could help
Pennsylvania meet new auto-emission standards.
Over time, conversion of American coal to liquid fuel could ease the nation's growing dependence
on foreign petroleum, which now provides 50 percent of our needs. It could, as well, eliminate any
perceived need to exploit environmentally sensitive areas for oil, such as the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge.
But to get off the ground and break into a field where prices are at an all-time low when adjusted
for inflation, prices that are subsidized by America's huge military commitment to protect the oil
fields and sea lanes in the in the Persian Gulf region, Rich needs the help of the government. He needs
both the state and federal governments to extend investment tax credits to this enterprise, and have
the state exempt the ultra clean fuel from the motor-fuels tax for seven years.
Do that and Rich says he can have the plant up and running in 2003.
Here is a chance, it seems to us, for Pennsylvania to do a lot of things for itself, with wider
benefits for the country over the long haul. One day, we suspect, the economics of this endeavor will
be such that government support will be unnecessary.
But there are advantages to getting started now, not the least of which is that it would put
Pennsylvania in the forefront of a new technology that could spawn a whole new industry. For a very
modest cost, that could mean a rebirth for long-suffering coal regions here and elsewhere in the state
and country.
That sounds to us like an investment worth making.