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W&J speakers see a fire under coal to mid-century

3 min read
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Steve Winberg is an executive with Consol Energy Inc., which last fall sold five longwall mines in West Virginia. Yet, he insisted Tuesday night his company is not abandoning coal, and neither should the rest of the world.

His message: There is – and will continue to be – a burning need for that energy source.

“Fossil energy will play a prominent role beyond 2050,” Winberg said during “A Vision for Coal,” the fifth and final installment of the second annual Energy Lecture Series at Washington & Jefferson College.

Winberg, Consol’s vice president of research and development, and Peter Balash, an executive with the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, shared the dais in Yost Auditorium inside the Burnett Center.

Both work locally, Winberg in Southpointe, Balash at NETL’s site near South Park. They are in the heart of Marcellus Shale, where natural gas is a bountiful, increasingly popular, cost-effective resource, and in the midst of coal, which in some corners has a name as dark as its essence because of unclean emissions.

Each spoke for about a half-hour, accompanied by PowerPoint, before fielding questions.

They discussed other energy forms, but mostly focused on coal, which is being exported from this country in increasing quantities. Much of the globe, they said, is electricity needy.

“Billions of people don’t have access to electricity,” Winberg said. “In terms of budgets, fossil energy is woefully underfunded for how much of it goes to the world.”

In response, Balash said, “We will see a large increase of coal consumption worldwide by 2040. We need to reduce carbon dioxide. You can’t just replace coal with natural gas, but we have to improve carbon capture.”

Winberg said Consol believes the number of natural-gas power plants will increase over the “next five to 10 years,” and technological improvements could lead to “near zero percent emissions from coal-fired power plants – but that’s 10 years away.”

But transitioning from coal, he added, will take time. “It took 130 years to build the existing electricity infrastructure. You can’t retrofit it in just 20 years.

“I think what we’ll see is, one-third coal, one-third natural gas and one-third renewables,” he said.

But Winberg also predicted global consumption and U.S. exports of coal will continue to grow, with U.S. coal usage declining, and the majority of new electricity generation moving to natural gas-fired.

He closed his lecture with a challenge: “Convince the American public we need to use coal. It’s a low-cost domestic resource” that has been in use for more than 200 years.

Near the end of the Q-and-A, Winberg looked about the audience of 60-plus, many of them W&J students, and pointed out the energy-related opportunities available in what many believe to be a stagnant labor environment.

“For the first time since the end of World War II through the 1960s, this area is poised for a manufacturing renaissance,” he said. “You have low-cost electricity, low-cost natural gas, a workforce that’s trained – things that can bring manufacturing back.

“We are in an energy revolution in this country, and it’s driven largely by shale. There are plenty of jobs within a 100-mile radius. This is our time, and we should take advantage of that.”

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