That said, like corn (another thread) there is nothing inherently wrong with coal in small doses.  Smite me with words if you want, but a tons or two burned here and there really isn't all that bad.  The problem is these huge users that require 100 car trains once or twice a week.

I was a blacksmith apprentice for about a year and really enjoyed it.  We'd burn maybe a ton every year or two but there's no way to make ornamental iron, knifes, and other cool stuff without a real hearth.  It was fun in the winter when it was cold as heck.  I learned a lot about steel grades, fullering, heat treating, tempering, and sharpening.  

Nasty, smoky, and dirty, yes, yes, yes.  But our test for knives was to hang a 1/4 inch rope from the ceiling, no weight, just dangling loose.  If you could cut it clean in one swoop the knife was done.  It did take practice.

Shame, due to environmental regs us poor small blacksmith guys (any gals out there?) got the kybosh while HUGE coal power plants were planned to come online.  That really sucked.  It ain't coal that is the problem, it's how we use the stuff.  

Onward through the fog

Still, why not, it is as fine a time for a happy dance as any.

Sammie,
I did not know that coal is used by blacksmiths.  But I am not surprised.  Probably it is the same thing with the furnaces used for glass-blowing, an art that fascinates and terrifies me equally.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

1. The china effect.  China is building lots of everything, and this has driven up costs for all the raw materials that go into power plants, from steel to copper.  Some of this is probably speculative (it's a good time to be in the commodities business), but the underlying increase in demand is dramatic.  ANY think that has cast iron in it is probably 30 - 50% more expensive today than it was 5 years ago.  (Take this from a guy who's bought a lot of industrial turbines and generators over that period, and gotten slapped around with a lot of sticker shock.)

2. Pollution control.  The overwhelming majority of our existing coal fleet predates the Clean Air Act, and was grandfathered out of compliance.  New coal plants have to add all sorts of backend equipment (baghouses, scrubbers, etc.) that the old coal plants didn't have to.  In aggregate, this just about doubles the installed cost of the facility.  It also lowers the generating efficiency, which has the perverse effect of (a) increasing the cost of power, since we have to burn more fuel to make a MWh and (b) increasing the carbon emissions from coal plants since we have to burn more fuel to make a MWh.  This is one of the greatest unappreciated failings of the clean air act, but that's a subject for another post.

3. Capacity factor.  For the last 30 years, we haven't really had to build much new baseload power.  We had spare reserve margin in the coal plants, spare reserve margin in the nukes and could get by just building gas peakers.  But as load has grown (and generation fleet has not), those coal and nuke plants are now just about maxed out.  Which meaans that there is all of a sudden a massive rush to put a lot of capital in the ground, compounding the demand issues associated with the china effect, and adding on lots of extra $ for pollution control.

Now the dollar is so low it makes exports profitable but imports extremely expensive, especially from EU countries (e.g., the turbine).  The Chinese Yuan is begged pretty much to the dollar but still there are shipping costs as well.  

Need I mention that heavy industry took a huge beating in the U.S. and we simply don't have the iron workers, pipe-fitters, and steam boiler workers like we used to - I mean check out the Great Lakes heavy industry centers and all you'll see is miles of abandoned warehouses with broken windows.

Canis - most small time blacksmithing is done with coal in a small fire where you put the metal IN the coals and turn on a blower that can get you direct heat. Basically you heat up existing metal until it glows red-orange and throws off sparks, and then hammer, bend, twist, fold, or whatever before it cools.  The best blacksmiths, incidentally, were perhaps the makers of real Samurai swords in Japan.

Most glass-blowing is done in electric pots (like for firing pottery) using indirect heat - in other words, in a crucible pot instead of an open flame.   The idea is to melt cullet (broken glass of certain colors or qualities) and maybe add some compounds for coloring, or more pure silica, or whatever you want.  Special cooling oven are required because if molten blown glass cools too quickly it can explode - so it's hot work as well.


Onward through the fog

Global emissions of carbon dioxide from shipping are twice the level of aviation, one of the maritime industry's key bodies has said.

What a lot of people don't know is the all coal fired boilers must be cleaned now and then.  This involves stack blowing and boiler tube cleaning.  The kinds of crust that build up inside the pipes and stacks is similar in heat resistance to asbestos, so it must be cleaned or the boiler will fail to work.  It is nasty, dangerous work.  

Even the waste from an oil-fired boiler is tremendous.  I had the pleasure of watching a steamship "blow its tubes" off Brownsville TX and it shit a stretch that covered a good part of the sky, and the next morning we had toxic black stuff washing up all over our beaches.  Of course, the authorities didn't do anything ...
/sam

Onward through the fog

The ruling could have an impact across the country and was hailed as a victory by environmental groups that warn the plants contribute dangerously to global warming.

"As far as I know, this is the first time an air permit for a coal-fired power plant has been denied based on concerns about the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on human health and the environment," Nick Persampieri, an attorney in Denver for the environmental group Earthjustice, said Friday. "We think it is a big deal."

The case will be used as a precedent elsewhere, he said.

Coal Plants Rejected - AP (via Forbes)

What is that giant sucking sound? The sound of big capital headed out of coal and into green energy. Thanks Republican-stacked Supreme Court who declared we really should do something about global warming back in April.

Once conservatives realize there is money to be made building the sustainable energy economy, this argument will be over.

Today is a tipping point.

If you're into the history of ship propulsions systems, pick up a Churchill biography. (Or Yergin's The Prize.)  He made his name in WWI by converting the British Navy to oil-fired ships, which gave them a huge tactical advantage because they could now accelerate/manuever much more quickly (since a coal ship is only as flexible as the dude with the shovel).  That got a lot of credit for British naval superiority in WWI, and helped him get his later job in WWII.  At which point it became pretty important for Britain to develop strategic links to places that had oil, since Britain only had coal.  Which led to the creation of national petroleum companies (the predecessors of BP and Shell) and a few small investments in the Persian gulf.