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Re: sumisu post# 5242

Friday, 11/07/2008 9:31:20 AM

Friday, November 07, 2008 9:31:20 AM

Post# of 8507
coal: a finite resource is being consumed like no tomorrow to generate electricity

JEFF GOODELL, Author, Big Coal: We seem incapable of grasping what's at stake here. And perhaps it's because so much is at stake and addressing this really means changing sort of the essential economic engine of our lives, which is fossil fuels.

MARTIN SMITH: To understand the magnitude of the task, consider the scale of America's addiction to fossil fuels like coal. Every year, Americans consume over a billion tons. In the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, they shovel a million tons a day.

STEVEN LEER, CEO, Arch Coal: Our single mine of Black Thunder produces more energy every year, or every day, than the North Slope of Alaska. And every 24 hours, we'll have approximately 35 miles of trains loaded.

MARTIN SMITH: Most of the trains head east to power plants in the Midwest and South. Coal shipments make up half of all rail traffic in the country. At this railyard in Nebraska, coal trains account for 70 percent of traffic.

CAMERON SCOTT, Union Pacific Railway: Every day, we process 150 to 170 trains, which if you do the math is, you know, about a train every seven minutes.

MARTIN SMITH: [on camera] So they're coming out of the Powder River Basin through here, on to the east and to the south?

CAMERON SCOTT: That's exactly right. And as -

MARTIN SMITH: The empties going back.

CAMERON SCOTT: And the empties coming back the other way. There is no question that there's nothing like this anywhere on earth. It is absolutely the world's largest conveyor belt. And it never stops.

MARTIN SMITH: [voice-over] There are 600 coal-fired power plants in the country. A large plant will burn through one whole trainload in just 12 hours.

CHARLIE POWELL, Manager, Mountaineer Plant: We generate 1,300 megawatts per hour at this generation facility. So we power up many cities from this one unit.

MARTIN SMITH: This plant in West Virginia is owned and operated by American Electric Power. In 2007, AEP was the single biggest emitter of CO2 in America.

[on camera] Nowadays, everybody's talking about climate change, everybody's talking about global warming, everybody's talking about going green. What does that mean for you?

CHARLIE POWELL: The thought of green is nice. It's politically the right thing to do. But people also like their electricity. When they flip the switch, they want the lights to come on.

JEFF GOODELL: Most Americans don't have any idea that we still burn coal. They think of it as something that went out with, you know, top hats and corsets and because they don't see it because it's burned far away and it just powers our lights, and we don't think about where that electricity comes from and what really goes on behind the light switch.

MARTIN SMITH: [voice-over] The facts are these. It takes one pound of coal to power your TV for four-and-a-half hours, another pound to power your bedside light for two evenings. The average American household uses nine-and-a-half tons of coal every year. Fifty-two percent of all electricity consumed in America comes from coal. And with electricity consumption rising, utilities like AEP say coal is indispensable. They refer to it as base-load power. It means it is always available, unlike intermittent sources, such as solar or wind.

the above was just a snipit from the transcript

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/heat/etc/script.html

Solar Stocks #board-11148
Peak Oil #board-6609
Coal #board-2809
Real Estate Bubble #board-7285
Lender Implosion #board-10076
HomeBuilders #board-1680
Your Economy #board-1948
Global Warming #board-11877

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