Coal

Westinghouse Electric Corp. will attempt to develop a new type of combustion-turbine engine for use in utility power plants at its Concordville research facility in Chester County, the company said yesterday. Westinghouse was chosen by the U.S. Energy Department to head a five-year, $12.6 million development program aimed at making a turbine engine that can run relatively inexpensively on coal, officials said. "Such plants would expand the utilization of the extensive coal deposits of the United States," said Cliff Seglem, a manager at Westinghouse's Concordville office, in a prepared statement.

WAYNESBURG, Pa. - All night and day, trains rumble through the hills and valleys of Greene County, where coal is king and the rails carry away the crown jewels, 42 million tons of black bituminous a year, now fetching double its price of just two years ago. Waitress Tonya Woodring, 38, pours coffee at Lavern's Place, a breakfast spot for miners coming off the overnight shift. Taking a break, she lights a cigarette and lists her family's "toys" - all purchased with the $80,000 a year her husband makes working a mandatory six 10-hour days a week in a job that bears little resemblance to the pickax mining of the past.

The story "Amid growth of renewables, coal fights to keep its share" (Sunday) failed to emphasize that unless we rapidly move from coal to renewable energy, we risk destabilizing the Earth's climate. That climate change is real and caused by man is supported by the most respected scientific institutions in the world. Most scientists believe that climate change, if left unchecked, will increase flooding and droughts, the incidence of infectious diseases, the intensity of extreme storms, the sea level between 7.1 and 23. 2 inches, and the Earth's surface temperatures between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees Celsius.

It's Christmas morning. Freshly fallen snow covers the countryside. A fire crackles in the fireplace. The family gathers around the Christmas tree. You're handed a gift. A small one. Very small. "What could it be?" you wonder as you tear away the wrapping. "It's a . . . It's a . . . It's a beach tag," you say, perhaps more in wonderment than appreciation. Yes, beach tags for Christmas. Ocean City - the people who brought you Miss Crustacean pageants, French Fry Sculpting contests, Martin Z. Molusk, the hermit crab and his pal, Gus the Amazing Weather Dog - want the desperately-seeking-a-present crowd to shell out $8 for a 1991 beach tag. Checks or money orders made out to the City of Ocean City can be sent to the Beach Fee Office, City Hall, Ninth Street and Asbury Avenue, Ocean City, N.J. 08226.

Bent over his metal cane, flecks of snow covering the shoulders of his dark gray overcoat, 83-year-old retired butcher Louis Tulin shuffles down the basement steps of the grand old synagogue here. As he walks through the doorway, on the arm of his 80-year-old brother, David, a small circle of elderly gentlemen seated along a paneled wall begin to chatter - and smiles appear on their forlorn faces. "That makes eight and nine," said Bernard Shanfield, 75, president of Beth Israel, the only Jewish congregation in this Schuylkill County town.

Pennsylvania now proudly boasts one of the most far-reaching and ambitious renewable-energy measures in the nation. Yet, during final debate on the issue in the waning days of the 2003-04 legislative session, some were willing to sacrifice real environmental progress in their apparent determination to kill the measure simply because it dared to mention coal along with wind and solar energy. Fortunately, progress won the day. Gov. Rendell recently signed into law a clean-energy portfolio standard that ensures that in 15 years, 18 percent of all of the energy generated in the state will come from clean, efficient sources.

When its customers need more electricity than it can produce, Philadelphia Electric Co. plans to build three coal-fired power plants. The approach, outlined in the utility's 20-year forecast and plan, has been called a retreat to the Dark Ages by a PE critic, in light of increasing environmental opposition to burning coal. Critics contend that if PE were more aggressive in encouraging conservation of electricity, it would not need to build new plants. PE, which feels that it was burned when regulators would not allow it to recover all of its costs for the Limerick 2 nuclear power plant in western Montgomery County, defends the plan to build coal-fired plants as the least costly way of adding new generating capacity.

As the late-morning sun burned the mist off the rolling hills of the Mahanoy Valley, a state legislative committee continued its examination of the Girard Estate yesterday with an inspection of its coal-mining operations here. The committee came to Pennsylvania's anthracite mining region to get a better understanding of why the Board of City Trusts, which oversees the Girard Estate, invested $19.9 million in 1996 to begin actively mining and processing coal on its own, said Rep. Thomas P. Gannon (R., Delaware)

Josh Moyer, a seventh-grader who knew plenty about sports and his hometown, was sure that his teacher was wrong. Pottsville, the teacher had said, once was home to a National Football League team. "This Pottsville?" Moyer thought. For him, big-time sports in Pottsville meant a Nativity High School girls' basketball game. His gray city, with its barely beating heart of old storefronts, with its now-subdivided Mahantongo Street mansions, with its scarred hillsides stripped of the anthracite coal that once infused it with a social and economic vitality, was by then little more than a museum piece.

All night and day, trains rumble through the hills and valleys of Greene County, where coal is king and the rails carry away the crown jewels, 42 million tons of black bituminous a year, now fetching double its price of just two years ago. Waitress Tonya Woodring, 38, pours coffee at Lavern's Place, a breakfast spot for miners coming off the overnight shift. Taking a break, she lights a cigarette and lists her family's "toys" - all purchased with the $80,000 a year her husband makes working a mandatory six 10-hour days a week in a job that bears little resemblance to the pickax mining of the past.

COAL-MINING millionaire Tom Smith of western Pennsylvania, a newcomer to statewide politics who spent $4 million of his own money on TV advertising, easily won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, defeating the party-backed candidate and three others. The Associated Press called the contest for Smith with about 70 percent of the vote counted at 10:10 p.m. Smith, a high-school graduate from Armstrong County, presented himself to primary voters as the folksy everyman, "just a farm boy that got misplaced in the coal mines and started my own business.

When New York investment manager Doug Topkis bought an 8,000-acre coalfield near Tamaqua in bankruptcy court two years ago, he didn't know anthracite from bituminous. He does now. Rebuilding a Pennsylvania coal business in the age of alternative fuels and in the shadow of the state's booming Marcellus natural gas production has proved to be an education in energy, logistics and global economics. Topkis, and his father-in-law, auto-sales and housing mogul Bruce Toll, of Philadelphia, had loaned money to the former Lehigh Coal & Navigation Co., which went belly up in 2008, steeped in debt, unable to pay its bills, and the object of 24 state environmental infractions for failure to restore mine pits and treat acid water drainage.

MORGANTOWN, W. Va. - Proposed changes to U.S. Department of Labor rules would make it easier for coal miners and their families to obtain black-lung benefits, while a West Virginia congressman aims to reduce the amount of paperwork they have to fill out in the first place. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - dubbed "Obamacare" by critics - requires the Office of Workers' Compensation Program to reinstate two provisions of the Black Lung Benefits Act that were eliminated in 1981.

Edgar "Ned" Belleville Coale, 87, a retired optical company owner, died Saturday, Dec. 31, of complications from emphysema at his home in Chestnut Hill. Mr. Coale was a self-taught mechanical engineer with a master's degree in English literature; a pipe smoker devoted to running and swimming; and a Quaker who served in the military during World War II. A friend, the late Ian McHarg, a prominent regional planner and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, called Mr. Coale "a mix of glorious contradictions.

Seven Pennsylvania coal-fired power plants are among the 100 highest industrial emitters of greenhouse gases in the United States, according to data released Wednesday by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Ranking 12th on the national list is FirstEnergy Generation Corp.'s Bruce Mansfield plant in Beaver County, the state's biggest. The other plants are Brunner Island, Conemaugh, Hatfield's Ferry, Homer City, Keystone, and Montour. No New Jersey plants made that top 100 list.

WE KNOW Christmas is a few days away, and so maybe we shouldn't be so depressed about the giant lumps of coal left in our stockings already - one from Congress and one from Harrisburg. Actually, Congress' action to kill a payroll tax cut for working Americans, and Harrisburg's announcement that revenue shortfalls will lead to big cuts to close a $500 million hole in the new state budget gives coal a bad name. Besides, coal is cheap, and these actions will be expensive. For example, Congress' refusal to extend payroll tax cuts will cost a family with $50,000 in income about $1,000 a year.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author of the just-released The End of Sparta. There is a revolution going on in America. But it is not part of the tea party or the loud Occupy Wall Street protests. Instead, massive new reserves of gas, oil, and coal are being discovered almost everywhere in the United States, due to revolutionary methods of exploration and exploitation such as fracking and horizontal drilling.

PITTSBURGH - Texas Gov. Rick Perry came to a steel plant here Friday morning to advocate for increased energy production - particularly through coal and natural gas extraction - and to criticize the role of federal environmental regulators. In Perry's first policy speech of the Republican presidential campaign, he outlined plans to create a projected 1.2 million jobs by stripping energy industries of regulations and to open up federal lands and offshore waters to drilling. He also pledged a series of executive orders in his first days as president that would strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its regulatory power over greenhouse gases and air-quality standards for power plants, and in strong words equated the federal agency with anti-American energy producers in Venezuela and the Middle East.

PITTSBURGH - Texas Gov. Rick Perry came to a steel plant here Friday morning to advocate for increased energy production - particularly through coal and natural gas extraction - and to rip the role of federal environmental regulators. In Perry's first policy speech of the Republican presidential campaign, he outlined plans to create a projected 1.2 million new jobs by stripping energy industries of regulations and to open up federal lands and offshore waters to drilling. He also promised a series of executive orders in his first days as president that would strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its regulatory power over greenhouse gases and air-quality standards for power plants, and in strong words equated the federal agency with anti-American energy producers in Venezuela and the Middle East.

By Stephen P. Kunz The current wave of Marcellus Shale gas drilling has many Pennsylvanians worried about the impact on their water supplies - understandably so. The state's natural-gas industry faces significantly less environmental regulation than the coal industry does, but its potential repercussions are at least as serious. Gas reserves underlie most of the commonwealth, so gas drilling can be expected to span a much greater area than coal mining, which is now largely confined to 10 southwestern counties.