Gasoline from coal, a diesel substitute from coal, hydrogen from coal...
If you'll forgive a capitalist moment, doesn't that make coal an attractive investment?
ANR (recent IPO)
ACI
ARLP
BTU (biggest USA coal company, Peabody coal)
MEE
PVR (buys coal rights, leases them to operators)
Anyone have favorites, or other choices? There's also Chinese and maybe other coal companies. I don't know which are best located, or the most ecologically tidy, or who have the best coal. There's also many other companies that have coal as part of their operations (along with oil or electricity generation etc.).
Coal has a lot of problems. The ones I've heard mentioned:
- toxic impurities (sulfur, mercury, even some radioctive stuff) (no currently known method to remove the mercury
- Carbon dioxide, particulates
- sulfur becomes acid rain
- destruction of land (rip down a mountain for the coal, and in the process obliterate streams and rivers -- see this months Harpur's magazine)
- coal is not as abundant as we thought -- if the price estimates for Fischer-Tropsch are based on current day anthracite, the real cost 10 years from now when we are mining mud and washing it to find Lignite (which is 54% of USA reserves, with half the energy of real coal) will be higher.
Still...
the doomsday scenario says oil peaks now and starts a slow (2% to 6%) decline, and 10 years later natural gas peaks and starts a very rapid decline.
Even if the entire world thinks it can simultaneously build 1,000s of nukes and windmills, it'll be coal keeping the lights on if anything does.
- tilyou1@yahoo.com |
