The federal advisory committee focused on coal for the U.S. Department of Energy devoted much of its annual fall meeting to discussing technologies that may provide opportunities for the struggling coal sector.
But several coal industry experts and representatives seemed less optimistic that the commercialization of these technologies would occur in time to have a significant impact on coal's current trajectory.
Speaking before the National Coal Council's Sept. 12 meeting in Washington, D.C., Brian Anderson, director of the National Energy Technology Laboratory operating under the Department of Energy, said the DOE is working to develop the so-called coal plants of the future — smaller, modular and more efficient coal-fired power plants — as well as carbon capture technologies. In 2025, it plans to roll out the first pilot-scale modular coal plant as well as the next generation of carbon capture technology into the commercial sector, he said.
Moody's wrote in a July report that coal's proportion of the U.S. energy mix may fall to as low as 11% by 2030 based on scheduled and expected unit retirements. By then, there may be ancillary benefits put on coal for factors such as resiliency and storage, which may improve the market for coal, Anderson said in an interview following his remarks.
If the new coal plants prove themselves economically, he said, then there will be private sector interest.
"For the future of coal, you have to rely on technology to get there," he said. "In the end, if our goal is low-cost, low-carbon-emission energy, then I think there are a lot of tools in our tool set to try to get there."
Hal Quinn, president and CEO of the National Mining Association, said it is tough to say whether the 2025 projected roll out date will be soon enough to affect coal's decline.
"It's not just the technology, it's also how the market looks in terms of capital costs, electricity prices and what's the levelized cost of this technology coming out," he said. "I can't say whether it will be in time or not. We'll always need power, so if ... coal can get more flexible and more efficient, then there will always be a place for that. 'When' is a matter of the way markets go."
Jason Selch, CEO of Enchant Energy Corp., the company seeking to retrofit the San Juan generating station in New Mexico with carbon capture and storage technology, said 2025 is not soon enough for carbon capture development.
"When you're developing technology, six years between version two and version three is too long," Selch said. "If it takes us 10 years to get the costs down to the DOE $30 [cost per ton to capture carbon] level, it's too late. In the meantime we pumped out into the atmosphere so much CO2. Let's get with it sooner. We need a bunch of these projects."
The key is to get utilities to buy into building a coal plant and using these technologies, said Randall Atkins, founder and executive chairman of metallurgical coal producer Ramaco Resources Inc. There are compelling reasons to look at coal, including its fuel-security aspects, he said, and carbon capture "will be a big answer" over time.
"The challenge is to get the utility world in sync with the advantages of using coal, which of course they understand," Atkins said. "But in this kind of low-gas-price market, it's awfully seductive for them to continue to use gas as opposed to coal."
