Word: coale
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...King Coal's new popularity, however, is like a runaway mine train heading for a collision with states and cities struggling to meet pollution standards. Environmental controls on electric plants have cut emissions of six principal air pollutants by half since 1970, despite a 42% increase in energy consumption. But even with mandated controls, old-fashioned pulverized- coal plants still spew nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide (think acid rain) as well as toxic mercury. Carbon dioxide emissions, blamed for global warming, would soar. Shareholder activists are increasingly aggressive about demanding an accounting when companies like TXU, which had 2005 earnings...
...McCall, as TXU's head of wholesale operations, says he needs a low-cost, reliable supply of electricity fast. Plans for nuclear facilities will take nearly a decade to develop. Coal is quicker. Using the company's new "lean academy" philosophy (based on Toyota's manufacturing system), TXU can build all 11 coal-fired plants, cookie-cutter style, with the first online in 2009. Coal gasification simply isn't in TXU's plans, primarily because of problems with the high moisture content of the cheaper Texas and Wyoming coal it buys. Waiting until the next decade, when new technologies...
...buying that argument. The goal of the coalition she helped form with major muscle from Houston--Texas Citizens for Climate Protection--is not to stop the plants, she says, but to make TXU adopt cleaner technologies like gasification. Tampa, she points out with irritation, buys its clean-coal-compatible coke in Houston, after all. So far, she has won over 17 cities and hopes to raise nearly $500,000 to hire the best air-modeling experts and lawyers for the battle. She has no other choice than to fight. The city is already a "non-attainment zone" for smog...
...granddaddy of coal plants, Big Brown, built in the early 1970s in the rolling hills of east Texas, the sky is a pristine blue above two big smokestacks. That's illusory, since the plant pumps out a steady stream of can't-see-'em pollutants like nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury. Inside, giant HEPA filters (which look just like a nest of vacuum bags) grab most of the solids from the coal fire. You wouldn't want to eat off the floor, but the place is clean. Even the open-pit-mining operation nearby--which has scoured...
Miller, of course, went on a Big Brown tour too and promptly popped open a canister of coal, she says, to shrieks of "No, it's filthy!" from the TXU staff. "They don't see the irony," she says. "'Why would you want to touch the coal?' they asked. My response? 'Why would I want to breathe it?'" TXU estimates the plant emits 82,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, 6,700 tons of nitrogen oxide and 1,180 lbs. of mercury a year--not to mention 10 million tons of unregulated carbon dioxide. Now it wants to add a third...