Curtis Tate, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Coal’s Rebound May Not Last, and Here’s Why

With higher natural gas prices and rising demand for electricity, coal is on the rebound.

Coal production is up nearly 20% in West Virginia over last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and nearly 16% in Appalachia.

The West Virginia Public Service Commission extended the lives of three coal-burning power plants in the state, helping them operate into the next decade.

Natural gas prices are higher this year, making coal more competitive to generate electricity.

But next year, there are signs coal will continue to decline.

Though West Virginia has saved three power plants from near-term closure, others in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland are scheduled to shut down in 2022.

According to PJM, the regional transmission organization that coordinates power movements across 13 states and the District of Columbia, the Cheswick plant near Pittsburgh will close on April 1, followed by the Morgantown plant in southern Maryland and the Zimmer plant in southern Ohio at the end of May.

All three plants burn coal from West Virginia.

Michael Webber, a professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin, said the power plant retirements will continue.

“You’ll probably see retirements of coal plants on schedule, or ahead of schedule,” he said. “You won’t see many lifetime extensions for the assets.”

Plans by the Biden administration that favor renewable energy to cut carbon dioxide emissions could accelerate coal plant retirements.

That could take the form of a carbon tax. The Environmental Protection Agency might also issue more stringent wastewater rules for power plants.

In 2022, the Energy Information Administration forecasts coal generation will fall again as more plants shut down and natural gas prices come down from their winter highs.

“This probably lasts months, maybe a year and a half or so,” Webber said. “It doesn’t look like it’s going to last decades.”

Webber sees one bright spot for coal: the metallurgical kind that’s used to make steel. A $1 trillion infrastructure bill just signed into law could boost demand for steel, and the coal used to make it.

Webber noted that the price of metallurgical coal is higher than thermal, or steam coal, the kind used to make electricity. It is a more profitable business for coal producers.

“Coal still has a lot of value for metallurgical purposes,” he said, “for making metals, and also for making cement.”

For electric power generation, though, there are cleaner, cheaper alternatives in wind and solar.

Utilities once reliant on fossil fuels are embracing renewables, including West Virginia’s dominant utilities, American Electric Power and FirstEnergy.

Coal will have a good winter, Webber said, but the better times may last months, not years.

Kentucky Court Orders Justice To Pay Penalty Over Mine Reclamation

A Kentucky court has found coal companies owned by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice in default of a 2019 mine reclamation agreement.

A judge in Frankfort on Tuesday ordered Justice to pay a nearly $3 million penalty, plus interest, over mine reclamation work at three sites in eastern Kentucky that was not completed before deadline.

The judge revoked five of Justice’s permits, including some at mines he’d planned to reopen.

Justice also must pay attorneys fees to the state Energy and Environment Cabinet.

Attorneys for Justice had argued that the coronavirus pandemic made it impossible to meet the deadlines for completing the reclamation work.

The state countered that at least one of the deadlines passed before COVID-19 had widespread impacts and that one site had been left untouched for years.

Justice’s attorneys also tried to persuade the court to reduce the penalty based on work completed and to set aside the 8% per day interest rate it had agreed to pay.

“The Cabinet, nor the Court, has any obligation to continue to grant Defendants leniency,” Franklin Circuit Judge Thomas Wingate wrote in his 21-page order Tuesday.

Both Justice and his son, Jay, were named as defendants in the case.

A spokesman for Justice didn’t respond to a request for comment.

An NPR investigation in 2016 found that Justice’s coal companies owed $15 million in taxes and safety penalties across six states, including nearly $7 million in Kentucky.

Manchin Tells House Democrats to Vote on Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill

U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin has been negotiating for weeks with congressional Democrats on a big social spending bill. But they appear to be at a stalemate.

Manchin told reporters at the Capitol Monday that the House of Representatives should vote on a bipartisan infrastructure bill the Senate approved in August.

That’s not, however, what progressive House Democrats want. They want to vote on both bills at the same time. And even though they’ve come down on the original price tag, Manchin is still not on board.

“For the sake of the country, I urge the House to vote and pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill,” he said. “Holding this bill hostage is not going to work in getting my support for the reconciliation bill.”

Manchin said he wants more time to evaluate the social spending bill’s impact on the deficit and the economy. Those numbers would come from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, but the process can take a while.

With the slimmest of margins in Congress, Democrats can neither afford to lose Manchin’s vote, nor a number of progressives in the House. Balancing their priorities has proved a difficult task.

The infrastructure bill has a big provision that would help West Virginia and Appalachia.

The more than 2,000-page bill includes $11.3 billion for the cleanup of abandoned mine lands and extends mine reclamation programs for 15 years.

Manchin, the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, included both provisions in the bill.

It also includes billions of dollars to plug orphaned oil and gas wells.

Mine reclamation alone could create hundreds of jobs in West Virginia and generate billions of dollars in economic activity, a recent analysis found.

Attorney Who's Sued Carbide 4 Times Pushes for Civil Penalties

Union Carbide wants to voluntarily clean up an industrial site in South Charleston, but an attorney who’s suing the company says that’s not good enough.

Michael Callaghan, the Charleston attorney who’s filed multiple lawsuits against Union Carbide in U.S. District Court, says the company violated the federal Clean Water Act.

In a letter to the Department of Environmental Protection, he says the company shouldn’t be allowed to clean up the site without paying civil penalties.

Callaghan says Union Carbide can’t use the state agency’s Voluntary Remediation Program as long as it’s the subject of multiple federal lawsuits.

The site in South Charleston, which was an industrial landfill from the 1950s to the 1980s, has been contaminating Davis Creek, a tributary of the Kanawha River.

Expert testing of Davis Creek has revealed high levels of arsenic, chromium, cadmium, lead, selenium, mercury and other toxic substances.

Callaghan has filed four lawsuits since 2018 seeking to force Union Carbide to clean up the site and pay civil penalties. The most recent lawsuit was filed last month.

State officials last October issued a violation against Union Carbide under the West Virginia Water Pollution Control Act. The company appealed.

In July, the Department of Environmental Protection proposed a settlement agreement in which Union Carbide would clean up the site, but not pay any civil penalties.

Earlier this month, Union Carbide submitted an application for the state’s Voluntary Remediation Program to clean up the site. The state agency accepted the application and is negotiating an agreement.

In his letter, Callaghan asked the state agency to revoke the application within 10 days. Otherwise, he said he’d seek a restraining order from U.S. District Judge John Copenhaver, who’s overseeing the case.

Thousands of Oil, Gas Wells Need to Be Capped, and This is How Congress Can Help

West Virginia has thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells that need to be capped.

The state Department of Environmental Protection has identified more than 4,000, some of them more than a century old.

The wells contaminate soil and groundwater and release methane into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas that’s 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

According to federal estimates, the methane released from these wells annually is equivalent to burning as much oil as the nation produces in a day.

A bipartisan infrastructure bill the U.S. Senate approved over the summer would provide about $4.7 billion to cap these problem wells.

The House of Representatives has not yet voted on the legislation. It’s tied up because lawmakers are still negotiating the size and scope of President Joe Biden’s jobs plan.

Ted Boettner, senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, says the bill would benefit West Virginia’s economy and environment.

“This infrastructure bill offers an enormous opportunity for the state of West Virginia and Appalachia as a whole to plug thousands of wells and put thousands of people to work,” he said, “and address climate change.”

But is the state’s inventory of orphaned oil and gas in the state accurate? Boettner said the actual number could be staggering.

“The real answer to that question is we don’t exactly know,” he said, “because we’ve never tried to go out and document all of them.”

Some wells are so old, there’s no documentation of their existence. The state has limited resources to track the ones it knows about, much less find others.

“In West Virginia, there could be hundreds of thousands of them,” Boettner said. “So it’s really just the tip of the iceberg.”

Orphaned wells can be costly to fix. Boettner says on average, it costs $55,000 to cap a well, usually with concrete. Depth is a major factor driving the cost.

Horizontally drilled wells, like those used to produce oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing, could cost as much as $250,000 each.

While the state has a program to deal with abandoned wells, it’s small relative to the size of the problem.

In the long term, Boettner calls for the creation of a program for oil and gas wells similar to the Abandoned Mine Lands fund. The fund is supported by a tax on coal production.

A fee on oil and gas extraction could support a fund to cap oil and gas wells, he says.

For now, West Virginia will need to rely on the help that’s in the infrastructure bill.

W.Va. Customers Will Pay For Upgrades To 3 Coal Plants, PSC Rules

The West Virginia Public Service Commission on Tuesday gave three coal-burning power plants an extended lease on life that will be paid for by the state’s electric power customers.

The decision means the John Amos, Mountaineer and Mitchell power plants can remain in operation through 2040.

West Virginia ratepayers will be responsible for covering the $448 million cost of upgrading the plants to keep them in line with Environmental Protection Agency regulations. Kentucky and Virginia regulators declined to impose on their ratepayers any cost of keeping the plants open beyond 2028.

Supporters of extending the lives of the plants, particularly the West Virginia Coal Association, said the number of jobs they support and the tax base they provide to communities outweighed the increase in monthly power costs for consumers.

Consumer and environmental groups, as well as large industrial users of electricity, said power bills have gone up enough and make it harder to attract new residents and economic development.

With the rapid changes in the economics of electric power generation, as well as potentially stricter regulations on fossil fuels from the federal government in the coming years, there’s no guarantee any of the plants will operate until 2040. American Electric Power executives acknowledged this during recent testimony to the commission.

The company had sought a decision from the commission by Wednesday. That was the deadline for AEP affiliates Appalachian Power and Wheeling Power to declare that they would proceed with the upgrades at the three plants or announce their retirement in 2028.

In addition to the upgrades needed for EPA compliance, the commission’s order on Tuesday said West Virginia ratepayers would be responsible for covering any operating and maintenance costs for the plants beyond 2028.

In their testimony, AEP officials declined to provide an estimate of such costs.

“We are evaluating the order and working to determine what other actions need to be taken to move forward,” said Phil Moye, an Appalachian Power spokesman, in a statement Tuesday.