Coal-Burning Power Plants: Overview

Introduction

Coal-burning power plants (also known as coal-fired power stations) are facilities that generate electricity by burning the fossil fuel coal. First developed in the late nineteenth century, they went on to become one of the most common sources of electricity worldwide. In the United States, about half the country's net electricity generation came from coal-burning plants throughout the twentieth century. However, growing concern about the environmental impact of fossil fuels—particularly climate change—drove much controversy over the use of coal into the twenty-first century. Scientists identified coal-burning power plants as the largest single emitter of greenhouse gases worldwide by the early 2020s, as well as a major source of other pollutants. The US federal government took some steps to increase regulation and phase out coal power in the country, but the issue often stirred considerable debate.

Proponents of coal-burning power plants note that coal, like other hydrocarbons, has high energy potential that naturally makes it an effective fuel source. In the US, supporters often contend that this makes coal the most practical substitute for foreign oil. According to this camp, the substantial domestic deposits of coal in the United States are crucial to the goal of achieving energy independence. They assert that investment in coal and coal-fired machinery is more economically feasible than investment in alternative energy technologies, and that new technologies can improve efficiency while reducing emissions. Coal advocates also point out that despite twenty-first century declines in the US coal industry, the nation still relies substantially on existing coal-burning power plants, and they warn that efforts to rapidly phase out coal would have widespread negative economic and social effects.

Opponents of coal power, however, argue that the environmental and health costs are too high. Many experts consider coal the "dirtiest" fossil fuel, both in contributing to global warming and in other negative effects, such as illnesses caused by extraction methods and air pollution. They contend that money invested in coal recovery reduces the money available for developing and installing renewable power sources. Critics also suggest that most US coal reserves are not easily recoverable, requiring processes such as strip mining that have their own devastating environmental impacts even before the coal is burned.

Understanding the Discussion

Coal gasification: The chemical process used to burn coal in thin or poor-quality coal seams, turning the coal into a gas that can be burned as a fuel to generate power.

Greenhouse gases: Gases such as carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, and nitrous oxide that effectively raise the earth’s atmospheric temperature by absorbing thermal radiation from the sun.

Mercury: A silvery metallic chemical element that is often emitted by coal-burning power plants. Mercury is poisonous to living beings and can present a significant health rise as it accumulates in the environment.

Nitrogen dioxide: A reddish-brown, potent-smelling gas that forms toxic organic nitrates in the air and contributes to the production of ground-level ozone, a major component of smog.

Sulfur dioxide: A colorless gas with a strong odor, created by volcanic eruptions or the burning of coal. Sulfur dioxide exacerbates respiratory diseases, and long-term exposure can damage the lungs and airways.

History

The first known use of coal was around 1000 BCE in China, where it was used for smelting copper and casting coins. A few centuries later, Aristotle described a rock that burned like charcoal. In England, coal was extracted as early as the thirteenth century, from an exposed field near Newcastle, and was used by smithies, breweries, lime-burners, and forges. In the late 1400s, firebricks were invented, making chimneys inexpensive and creating a home-heating market for coal.

Coal was regularly exported to London throughout the Middle Ages, and thus began London’s long history of “pea soup” fogs. The brownish, gritty smog that resulted from the mixture of fog and air pollution from burning coal sometimes made it impossible to see for more than a few yards in the city. These fogs persisted into the twentieth century. A wood shortage in England during the sixteenth century resulted in the increased use of coal for home heating. Meanwhile, improved mining techniques made it possible to retrieve coal from underground coalfields, further increasing supply and prevalence. Later, glass, pottery, chemical, and iron industries developed along England's Tyne River, all of them dependent on coal. Coal was also used to evaporate seawater in the production of salt.

The Industrial Revolution made coal a major commodity, a status it enjoyed for approximately three centuries. James Watts’s improvement of the steam engine in 1769 led to a huge jump in demand for coal. Areas where large coal deposits were found often became industrial centers.

Coal mining began in the United States in 1748. Nearly forty states would eventually be found to have coal deposits, although their value and recoverability varied considerably. In the nineteenth century, Pennsylvania became the nation’s leading producer of steel, thanks in large part to the state’s substantial coal deposits.

In the early nineteenth century, some large cities in the United States and Europe were lit with gaslights fueled by gas generated from coal. Transportation depended on coal to power steamships and trains. Coal production contributed to the development of states and to westward expansion, fueling the railroads and steel mills. People enjoyed better food because steam-powered trains could bring food from farther away and get it to market in a fresher state than in preindustrial times. Railroads, first made of iron smelted in coal-burning furnaces, began to be made of steel from coal-burning mills. By the 1850s, coal-burning steam locomotives were transporting coal from the mines over steel rails to factories across the country.

The development of electric power in the late nineteenth century ended the use of gaslights, but it created a new and bigger market for coal. The first public coal-burning plants for producing electric power commenced operation in London and New York City in 1882. Famed inventor Thomas Edison developed the stations to provide electricity for household lighting. Coal soon replaced wood as the dominant source of energy in industrial nations, being used for home heating as well as for electrical production.

Coal remained the dominant source for electricity generation in the US in the twentieth century, typically making up about half of the total output. Hydropower and natural gas became the other major sources. However, in other sectors, coal steadily fell out of favor. Oil and natural gas took over the home heating market, for example. By 1951, as a result of rising vehicle ownership, oil had replaced coal as the largest overall fuel source in the United States. In the 1970s and 80s, nuclear power also emerged as another significant source of electrical power. Still, coal maintained its primary place in US power generation, and even saw a notable resurgence in the 1970s when oil embargoes led to oil shortages in the US. The coal-burning power industry also saw steady growth at the global level, especially as nations like India and China became more industrialized in the late twentieth century. During the 1980s China became the world’s largest coal producer.

This persistent popularity of coal drew increasing concern, however, as the modern environmental movement emerged. Scientists clarified the impacts of burning coal on soil, air, and water pollution. Emissions from coal-fired plants include soot, sulfur oxide, nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, mercury, methane, cadmium, uranium, lead, and other particulates and trace elements. The ash remaining after coal combustion either escapes into the atmosphere as a pollutant or must be disposed of as a hazardous waste. These toxic emissions mean that coal is regarded as a so-called dirty fuel; its emissions have been linked to respiratory and other diseases. The carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions produced by coal burning were also increasingly associated with climate change, causing global warming through the greenhouse effect. Meanwhile, coal extraction itself was blamed for numerous environmental problems—especially in cases of surface or strip mining, in which the sediment and any vegetation overlying coal deposits are completely removed—as well as serious health risks for miners.

As a result, by the twenty-first century there was growing pressure in the US to turn away from coal-burning power plants in favor of other electricity sources, especially renewable energy. Many coal-burning plants were decommissioned as they reached or neared the end of their operational lifespans anyway; generating capacity was largely replaced by natural gas power plants. Some federal policies also began to encourage the shift away from coal. In June 2005, Congress passed a nonbinding resolution calling for a cap on heat-trapping emissions. In December 2006, Congress extended tax credits for the development of renewable-energy technologies such as solar and wind power. Scientists also investigated so-called clean coal technologies intended to reduce emissions from coal plants, such as carbon capture and sequestration, in which pollutants are trapped and stored before they reach the atmosphere.

Despite such pressure, the US electric power market remained susceptible to complex economic and political forces that prevented coal-burning power plants from being phased out entirely. An increase in natural-gas prices at the beginning of the twenty-first century led to renewed support for coal, for instance, culminating in the May 2007 announcement of plans to build 151 new coal-burning power plants in the country. This boom proved short-lived, though, as the increase in shale-gas production that began around the same time soon caused a sharp drop in gas prices and a corresponding decline in coal production and consumption. According to the Center for Media and Democracy website SourceWatch, 104 of the 151 planned coal plants had been canceled by 2013. Meanwhile, more existing coal-burning facilities continued to be retired, and coal's share of US electricity generation dropped steadily through the 2010s, reaching about 20 percent of the total by 2020.

This decline was influenced by political factors, particularly efforts by the administration of President Barack Obama (in office 2009–2017) to address climate change. In 2015, the Obama administration released its revised Clean Power Plan (CPP), which proposed a 32 percent reduction of carbon pollution produced by power plants by 2030. Under this proposal, most of the nation’s coal-burning power plants were to be replaced by nuclear power plants, wind turbines, and other "clean" energy sources. Such efforts stirred controversy and backlash, however, and debate over the US coal industry became increasingly dominated by partisan politics. Critics of the CPP argued that a rapid move away from coal would negatively affect jobs nationwide and increase the country’s dependence on foreign oil. They also contended that the plan represented government overreach, and enforcement of the CPP was halted amid court challenges.

Debate over energy policy in general, and coal specifically, was a significant topic in the 2016 presidential election. Republican candidate Donald Trump, the eventual winner of the election, was a sharp critic of the CPP and used support for the coal industry to help win over working-class voters. After Trump took office in 2017, he directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to begin dismantling the CPP and took other steps to reduce regulatory pressure on the coal industry. The Affordable Clean Energy rule that replaced the CPP issued guidance to states (rather than top-down directives), allowed industry to set its own standards for emissions performance, loosened the carbon capture and storage requirement (which it argued was costly and unproven), and set no deadlines for implementation. Similarly, in 2018 the Trump administration sought to revise the EPA's 2011 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which limited toxic emissions from coal-fired power plants, and alleged that faulty cost-benefit analysis under Obama had been used to inflate the expected benefit.

Coal-Burning Power Plants Today

Despite the Trump administration's support for coal, the industry continued to decline steadily in the US. Pressures included high operating costs, competition from other energy sources, and stable demand for electricity, as well as ongoing opposition from environmentalists. After President Joe Biden took office in 2021, federal policy also shifted back in favor of phasing out coal. According to the US Energy information Administration (EIA), the United States had 242 coal-burning power plants in 2022, down from 557 in 2012. Renewable sources also surpassed coal in US electricity generation for the first time in 2022, indicating the ongoing evolution of the nation's energy sector. Market fluctuations did cause occasional variations in these trends; for example, there was a rise in coal production and coal-fired electric power generation in 2021 as natural gas prices surged. Coal also remained popular globally, particularly due to growth in China. Nevertheless, the overall trend of the US coal industry remained one of decline. By 2023, coal provided just over 16 percent of the US electricity supply.

Political issues around coal-burning power plants did continue to generate debate, however. Notably, the US Supreme Court heard arguments that the CPP's restrictions on emissions represented federal overreach. In West Virginia v. EPA (2022) the court's conservative majority ruled that the EPA did not have the authority to limit emissions at existing power plants in the manner that the CPP had enacted. However, the decision did not take away the EPA's ability to set new emissions-reduction standards in the future, as long as they adhered to the regulations set forth by the court, or to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at new power plants.

While the West Virginia ruling was considered a blow to environmentalists, the Biden administration continued to advocate for investment in renewable energy sources and the closure of coal-burning power plants. The EPA announced in 2022 that it was working to develop new rules that would target power plants and emphasize the cost-effectiveness of clean energy. In April 2024 the agency released strict new regulations, requiring coal-burning power plants to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent or cease operations by 2039. Other rules included tighter limits on mercury emissions, coal ash contamination of water supplies, and wastewater discharge from power plants.

These essays and any opinions, information, or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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