Money & Work

Fuelish Choices

Before you agree that liquid coal is the next great solution to U.S. dependence on foreign oil, take a drive through Appalachian coal country.

  jenlehod@hotmail.com

Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land

Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man?
—from the song “Paradise,” by John Prine

As I merged onto Interstate 81, on the way to visit an old high school friend who lives in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, I was looking forward to a peaceful, nature-imbued break.

Born and raised in the foothills of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, I have long had an affinity for the rolling Appalachians. But as the highway climbed from the Virginia border, the familiar, bucolic countryside gave way to a landscape I’d never experienced. Coal and timber trucks began to dominate the highway, and the verdant green of the foothills transmogrified into terrain that was battered, bruised, and brown. Outside the park, the hills rang with the non-stop clangs of heavy machinery. Often, the hills were simply gone.

I was in the heart of coal country—Letcher County, Kentucky: population, 24,250; per capita income, less than $12,000. Fortunes have been made digging coal out of the land, but eventually the coal money packs up and leaves town. Then roads crumble piece by piece down the hillsides, and streams seem to flood every year. Near the headwaters of the North Fork of the Kentucky River, Letcher County’s streams are mostly polluted. When I visited, they reeked of sewage, a legacy of hastily-built, infrastructure-poor coal camps of decades past.

“It looks like a war zone, a moonscape,” former coal miner and Appalachian activist Carl Shoupe said, describing the scenic views from the top of Black Mountain, Kentucky’s highest peak.

Whenever the debate over coal-to-liquid technology breaks into the news, I think of the devastated hollers of Eastern Kentucky. I wonder how anyone can promote liquefied coal as “green.”

Proponents argue that harmful carbon emissions from the conversion process can be harnessed and stored. They also tout coal’s ability to reduce dependence on foreign oil by, as the coal industry declares in one recent advertising campaign, supplying the nation with “energy from Middle America instead of the Middle East.” The resulting fuel can be used in diesel cars and trucks, and in jet engines, boats and ships.

Maybe harmful carbon emissions can be stored. But you still have to blast the tops off mountains to get to the coal.

Rampant Devastation

Coal mining has already proven disastrous for too much of Appalachia, and by some estimates, replacing just 10 percent of U.S. petroleum consumption with liquefied coal would lead to a 43 percent increase in mountain-top-removal mining. Grassroots activists, working with biologists and botanists, estimate that 1,200 streams have been buried, and that half a million acres of pristine, biologically diverse temperate forest have already been wiped out through mining operations.

Almost 240 sludge ponds for storing toxic mining byproducts litter the Southern Appalachians. One such pond sits just a few hundred yards from Marsh Fork Elementary School in Naoma, West Virginia, and children at that school have reported increased health problems from coal dust spewing from a nearby coal manufacturing plant. Robert Salyer’s film Sludge—produced by Appalshop, a media and arts organization in Whitesburg—documents how on October 11, 2000, one such pond started to leak, contaminating the water supply of 27,000 residents and dumping 306 million gallons of toxic waste into the streams and surrounding countryside.

Groups such as Kentuckians for the Commonwealth—where Shoupe is a member—and Appalachian Voices are trying to change that. In one effort, they have started using tools like Google Earth to document and map the 800-plus square miles of mountains destroyed through strip mining. Even though coal companies say they can reclaim and rehabilitate blasted-away mountains, activists are skeptical. Forests take thousands of years to grow back. Mountains, which took millions of years to form, never do.

Rising Opposition

But environmental groups note that liquefied coal is not renewable. Many argue that the resulting diesel fuel will be at least as polluting as petroleum.

The Cato Institute protests on cost grounds. Citing three previous congressional attempts—in the 1940s, 1960s, and 1970s—to subsidize liquefied coal projects, Cato notes that all these efforts sank before they got off the ground—but not before they cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

“After three bad fiscal marriages between taxpayer and the coal-to-liquids industry, one would think that the madness of this political love affair would safely be a thing of the past,” the institute said in a report last year.

A lengthy, multi-disciplinary study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also questions the short-term economic and technological viability of capturing and storing carbon emissions. The MIT team suggested in a 2007 study that replacing just 10 percent of U.S. gasoline consumption with clean coal fuel would cost a staggering $70 billion in capital investment—and warned that technology is far from ready for commercial-scale use.

But even if financially feasible, can coal extraction ever be considered clean and green?

“This coal-to-liquid thing, it might be a good thing. It might be,” said Shoupe, making what is hardly an easy admission for a man who has protested against liquefied coal at rallies across Kentucky. “But when people talk about coal to liquid, they don’t think about where it comes from.”

Great Smoky Mountains National Park, straddling East Tennessee and Western North Carolina, is the most visited national park in the United States, but few tourists who journey there bother to travel the few hours of winding roads into Kentucky to visit the northern cousins of the Smokies, and the Blue Ridge Parkway. If they did, I’m sure they would be unprepared for the stark contrast. I was. You hear of the devastation of mountaintop removal and coal pollution, but you might want to hold off on buying into the myth of clean, green liquefied coal until you see this with your own eyes.

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