Actually, since you’ve been so thoroughly buggered by me that you had to bring my name up in a completely off-topic manner (which is clearly a violation of the no flaming people rule on here but I’m sure the moderators favor you so this won’t catch their attention), I will point out just how tragically uninformed you are. AGAIN.
Exporting coal to China and taking Chinese jobs is what I’d call payback. My problem with it is 1) that it doesn’t go far enough to even the score; and 2) we’re only helping to poison the world’s skies, although the alternative, that being Chinese coal, is even worse.
Frankly I’m surprised you didn’t take the approach that America is poorer because we’re engaging in coal mining and we should instead be hiring cheap foreign labor to mine coal while putting American miners in the unemployment line so they can be reallocated into the “knowledge economy”. You should be out there telling them that the more Americans we put out of work the cheaper the coal is that we export and the more the economy grows! Ain’t economics fun! :rolleyes:
What the hell? No, really, what the hell? Anyone able to explain this statement to me?
This is an example of where Google is not your friend.
Coal isn’t magically transported from Wyoming to the 99% of coal power plants which aren’t located in Wyoming. It’s shipped by rail, under a pseudo-monopoly situation where many power plants have only one, single rail line to supply them, meaning according to the old Surface Transportation Board, the railroad can charge “whatever the market will bear.” So the cost of coal at the mine may be significant, or may be relatively insignificant compared to the transportation cost. So PRB coal may be $8, $6, or even $4 per ton in some cases. Big deal - a plant in Nebraska might pay $10 per ton on top of that for transport, and one in Virginia $90 per ton on top of it. Plants located within sight of each other can pay a differential cost of $20 per ton due to whatever Satanic rail contract they may or may not have. I know a lot about this because I used to be used as the “hammer” to negotiate a better rail contract for a power plant.
I don’t understand what you mean. Special barriers?
I read asking about “special barriers” as asking if coke for steel is handled by the US something like China handles rare earths or say how the US has handled certain high technology exports.
I don’t want to derail. Some of your other posts have suggested that you are no friend of unions, and negative comments about them seem to occur often in your writing. The relevance is that, for me anyway, the impression is a switch from ‘Just the facts Una’ to ‘Get them unions Una.’ I’m not sure if you’re personal or professional when the topic turns to unions. Explained, let’s drop it.
I supplement Google with the 'dope. Thanks for your answer.
My take on exporting coal to China takes a different tack, and may ultimately boil down to an ignorant outsider’s view. Meh, education through debunking in that case. What is my point? Consider from here:
Coal isn’t the only resource the US has in abundance. Few if any countries can match our potential for wind power generation- if only the projects could be developed. If they gain the same acceptance as offshore oil and gas for instance, we could displace a very significant amount of coal for export. Yes, it might take new rails and I’m not sure how dirty is dirty when we’re talking about coal terminals. I do know there is a multi-billion dollar export market here.
What DSseid said. Or, is it just not available in export quantities? Or… some other reason we don’t export it which I can’t guess.
The dispute in question was with local union mines. That’s a fact. It’s pertinent because they couldn’t just switch to another mine to get their coal, the union was organizing a protest which hit most of the large mines in the region. Thus necessitating looking for alternate sources of coal elsewhere.
Saying they were “union” was exactly as pertinent to the discussion as saying they were “mines” which produced “coal,” as it was the “union” action which prevented cheap local access to “coal.” In that case I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the union; on the contrary, if they had not decided to take action against the company, I wouldn’t have got a juicy $100,000+ consulting project.
IIRC much of the coking coal in the US is mined in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia. Wyoming and Montana PRB coal, as well as Illinois, Interior, San Juan and Uinta Basin, High Plains and Gulf Lignite, etc. coal, is not generally suitable for coking. Thus most coking coal in quantity would have to be shipped across the continent before it could even be transloaded onto ship.
The start up (and wind down) cost of cnuclear power is immense and the operating costs are similar to coal power, which has relatively cheap startup costs.
Some of this followed after China “started closing mines in 2008 to improve the industry’s safety record after 3,770 workers were killed in 2007, making the mines the world’s deadliest.”
Yes, the floods would have caused problems to the coal supply chain (mines, rail/road, and ports) in Queensland, but the largest coal-exporting port in the world – Newcastle – would not have been affected. Note, however, that China is not the main market for Australian coal: Japan and South Korea are.
My company has certainly looked at exporting to Asia before, and didn’t follow through because market conditions changed. Certainly regulatory and environmental issues need to be considered.
I don’t believe that those points outweigh mine, though, which is that the demand for coal is growing by leaps and bounds worldwide, and will continue to do so for at least the next two or three decades. I believe that the price of coal is going to reach and hold at a level that makes export (even with increased transportation and mitigation costs) profitable. This time.
The main point is that unions are a major factor in why the death rate of coal miners in America is ~1% that of China, and hence a big part of why this opportunity exists at all.
More explanation on the particular relevance would probably just make things worse.
