SEATTLE — Just as Washington is weaning itself off coal, two companies are pushing to make the state a leading exporter of the fossil fuel.
That has led environmentalists to wonder: If coal is so dirty that Washington won’t use it, should the state be sending it overseas?
Last year, a seaport just across the U.S. border in Delta, British Columbia, shipped 27 million tons of North American coal abroad. It is the busiest coal-export operation on the continent.
Now a company wants to ship up to 60 million tons of coal a year from refurbished docks near the Columbia River’s mouth. Another company, which has a contract to export 24 million tons of Rocky Mountain coal each year, plans to build a major shipping terminal near Bellingham.
“It’s a terrible, unprecedented idea,” said Brett VandenHeuvel, executive director of the nonprofit Columbia Riverkeeper, to The Seattle Times. “If we supply China with a large and inexpensive source of coal, then they’re more likely to just keep burning it.”
China has committed to cleaning up its energy. It is developing wind, solar and geothermal technology and is mandating strict pollution controls on power plants. But China still gets nearly 70 percent of its power from coal, and that isn’t expected to change soon because the country is building coal-burning power plants.
Some experts think the U.S. should accept coal’s growth as unavoidable and focus on cleaning its emissions.
“It’s a paradox,” said Charles Ebinger, director of the Brookings Institution’s energy policy initiative. “The Chinese are really moving vigorously on green technology, but Asia is growing so fast that demand for energy of all forms is going through the roof.”
Coal use in the U.S. is not growing, but coal mining is. Last week, the federal government agreed to lease access to an additional 750 million tons of coal in the Powder River Basin.
China has coal. But its mines are dirty and dangerous, and its rail infrastructure is so bogged down that it is easier for coastal cities to import coal. If the fuel doesn’t come from the U.S., it will come from South Africa or Australia or somewhere else, said Brookings’ Ebinger.
The current best hope for cleaner Asian emissions is to effectively capture and store that carbon underground. But energy experts say that process is prohibitively expensive.
David Pumphrey, an energy expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the decision on coal exports “will make no difference in the amount of coal China burns.”
