Yes, I am familiar with that report, and in fact took some assumptions for year 2000 generation from it. However, both I and some I know in the energy futures arena have some disagreements with it, principally on two levels:
The assumption of natural gas pricing is thought to be overly optimisitic on the part of the DOE. Some recent forecasts of demand seem to indicate that while in general gas will increase as a percent of energy supply for electrical production, the price per MBtu will increase far more sharply, and with greater variability, than the DOE predicts.
Already I have personally seen in one area of the US electric power generation from natural gas curtailed during the Winter months, because they can’t risk not having enough natural gas for home and business heating. So they fire up the coal plants and let them go 5% overpressure to squeeze every MW they can get out of them.
It is hard to see how coal generation will increase much at all in the US currently. There is only one coal power plant being built right now in the US (or actually, rebuilt - the KCP&L Hawthorne Unit, which exploded a couple years ago). And no more units realistically expected to be built anytime soon. And the EPA is cracking down hard on many older units that try to increase their capacity, claiming it is in violation of the Clean Air Act Amendments. In fact, the EPA has even brought a suit (of sorts) against another quasi-governmental entity, Tennessee Valley Authority, for increasing capacity at several of their coal plants (ignoring the HUGE strides TVA has made in cleaning up their coal plants for the last decade).
Here’s Anthracite’s straight dope on this (condensed from research I did last year, from various sources):
In September 1996, President Clinton designated 1.7 million acres of Utah wilderness as a national monument - the Escalante Memorial. The Administration alleged that the purpose of blocking coal mining in the area (called the Kaiparowits area) was simply to preserve a “beautiful, exotic place” that featured several archeological sites.
However, according to members of the Western States Coalition, a key archeological site and other important environmental sites the local residents wanted protected were left outside the 1.7 acre memorial, while ordinary desert land with no significance or unique natural features was included solely to block entrance to the environmentally friendly coal deposits.
The timing of this was also very suspect, since the announcement was made in the middle of the presidential campaign, right after the Democrats received large contributions originating from the Lippo group. John Huang, just after becoming second in command at the Commerce Department in 1994, began immediately campaigning for changes in US foreign policy in areas that would aid his former Lippo employer.
The Associated Press claimed that the Lippo Corporation in Indonesia is the only other source of the very low sulfur, non-polluting coal, outside the Utah Kaiparowits basin, that is currently available. And that several coal power plants arounf the World were potential customers for this coal supply in Utah. The Andalex Corporation, which held the leases on the now unavailable Kaiparowits coal, was forced to purchase equivalent quality coal from the Lippo group conglomerate, or use polluting coal sources. This especially had impacts for a plant to be built in environmentally-troubled Mexico, since now it must either buy coal from the Lippo group, or use a MUCH poorer quality local Mexican coal, with HUGE ramifications for pollution in the border region of Mexico and the US.
Another “curious” issue is that the President made this announcement very suddenly, without even consulting with the state of Utah’s lone Congressional Democrat, Bill Orton, in whose district the Kaiparowits basin is found. His plan removes all competition for his friends, the Lippo group, which alloes it to become the sole readily available source of the high quality (very low ash and very low sulfur) coal for the entire world.
The Lippo corporation founder, billionaire Mochtar Riady, his family members and associates gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Clinton and the Democrats. Earlier in December, Bill Clinton admitted that he received a letter from Riady urging him to “normalize” trade relations with Vietnam at a time when Riady was moving its $6.9 billion real estate and investment empire into the country. Shortly thereafter, in 1994, over protests from veterans and family members of American soldiers missing in action in the Vietnam War, Clinton ended the 30-year Vietnam trade embargo.
This was going to be a big operation too. There are about 62 billion tons of coal in southern Utah’s Kaiparowits Plateau. Mining it would have created thousands of jobs, and generated billions of dollars in school funds under the State’s 1896 agreement with the Federal Government under the Utah statehood enabling act. Andalex Resources had a projected production capacity of more than 3 million tons of coal per year from just their first mine in the region. With Clinton’s change of plans, they had to abandon the entire project.
This now un-mineable coal is known as “compliance” coal because its properties and quality meet Clean Air Act standards. It’s not the absolute best quality, as coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana is of better quality. However, the Kaiparowits region had the largest supply of clean, easily marketable coal, according to the director of Utah’s geological survey.
Thus, Clinton’s actions had several effects:
They helped create a monopoly for the Lippo Conglomerate coal,
They hurt the economy in Utah, and
They left Utah without a source of locally-available clean burning coal to provide the state’s energy needs when its present mines are depleted, in the range of 15 to 30 years from now.
Another issue is that unlike Utah coal, which is extracted by relatively environmentally friendly underground mining, the Indonesian coalis extracted by surface strip mining, which is not very environmentally friendly.
Overall, in the grand scheme of thing for the US, restricting mining in this area causes a dent on the coal supply, but only a small one. There is so much coal in Wyoming, Montana, North and South Dakota, and still in the Appalachians it doesn’t change projections out to 100 years very much at all.