The history of coal’s significance to Wyoming’s economy is
being written today. It is beginning to
look like a swan song.
Wyoming’s long
love affair with coal can be written in five brief epochal paragraphs:
First,
plentiful underground coal in places like Hanna, Rock Springs and Kemmerer were
key determining factors in the Union Pacific Railroad choosing a route through
the future state of Wyoming in the 1860s.
Without the railroad, the state, as we know it, would have not come into
being. Coal was a very big deal in our early days.
Second, when
the railroad switched to diesel, the coal mines dried up and Wyoming’s economy
suffered. Suddenly this abundant resource had fewer large customers.
Third, for
decades everyone knew that the Powder River Basin in northeast Wyoming had the
most abundant coal reserves on the planet.
But the coal was not as hot burning as coal from places like West
Virginia and Kentucky so it remained buried in the ground.
Fourth, an
environmental outcry in the 1970s saw a nation hungry for cheap energy turn to
Wyoming for coal that was “clean burning” and not nearly the pollutant that
that black, smelly stuff from back east provided. Wyoming embarked on a coal boom that lasted
four decades and is still going.
Fifth, today,
even so-called clean coal is under attack because scientists claim the
pollutants from it are destroying the atmosphere and causing climate change.
Coal is under assault across the world. Here in Wyoming, growth is stymied and
there is no easily growing market for our coal.
The statistics
are both grim and impressive. Some 17 percent of the coal-fired electrical
capacity in the nation will disappear in the next few years, according to the
Bloomberg New Energy Finance report.
Worldwide,
with places like India and China still building coal-fired plants, that same
outfit predicts the peak usage of coal will occur in 2025 and then a steep
decline will start. Here in America, it is already happening.
Internationally, some of the blame
is focused on Australia. Australia?
The dollar has
surged against the Australian currency in the past two years, causing worldwide
prices for product from that country to be much more competitive than American
coal.
This has put
American companies in distress because their hole card in selling more coal has
been a hoped for increase in exports as domestic demand goes down.
But exporting
coal is chancy as best. Bloomberg points out that China cut its coal imports by
34 percent since 2013.
What is most
depressing to Wyoming folks is that there still lies 300 years of coal in the
ground, yet to be mined. Expensive infrastructure is in place to mine it . . .
if there only was a market?
Jim Hicks, a
county commissioner and former newspaper publisher in Buffalo, is a funny
guy. And a clever one, too.
With apologies
to a guy named Sweat who first wrote this ditty 60 years ago and was talking
about whiskey, we get to read what Jim has to say why we should love coal and
why we may want to hate it, too. Here
goes:
“If you are talking about the black scourge that is pumping out tons of
monoxide into our atmosphere each day, creating global warming, violent
weather, damaging the lungs of the young and elderly . . . the product of the
greedy and wealthy people who run corporations placing stockholder profits
above the future of the very earth where we live, and have a heartless view of
our fragile environment with no concern of the many very species of animals and
birds which inhabit the earth . . . then my friend . . . I am opposed to coal
with every fiber of my
being.
“However, if by coal you mean the God
given blessing placed in abundance in this wonderful State of Wyoming, which
has provided cheap power for virtually every kind of industry and commerce in
our country, creating millions of jobs because that very power source has made
our goods and services competitive on the world market . . . the resource in
such abundance that it generates security for hundreds of years to come and
generates the tax dollars which create quality education, health services, law
enforcement, safety, good roads and highways, low unemployment and a higher
standard of living for all . . . then my friend, I am absolutely, unequivocally
in favor of it.”
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