February 2, 1977

King Coal Comes Back

Old King Coal is back on the throne.

The weather which has devastated much of the country finally has convinced us the good old days of cheap, clean, convenient gas are about over.

That dirty, smoky "high pollutin" coal is coming into style - and black is beautiful.

There are still a few years left of natural gas and oil, but the end is in sight to even the most indifferent consumer and the most concerned environmentalist.

The long range solution to U.S. energy problem is coal and atoms, according to an interview two years ago with Frank Zarb, then federal energy director.  He told me that we would have to live with soot and fear until such time - if ever - that science learns how to control hydrogen fusion.

Zarb recommended the deregulation of gas and oil as a means to stimulate production and make coal more competitive.  His statements, and my report of them, drew considerable flack.  However, events now confirm Zarb's judgment.

Where are you, Frank, now that we need you?

President Jimmy Carter, who vowed to stand up to the big energy producers, has asked Congress to deregulate natural gas and has authorized a "study" of the same thing for gasoline.

The resulting higher prices will hurt, but realistic economics will enable us to use the full range of energy sources available.  As we have come to realize, it was foolish to gear the nation's economy to a single, limited fuel, and doubly foolish to sell it for less than its worth.

But, no matter.  Realism has returned.

Not far behind will be some of the old ways tied to coal and some new ways born of a new fuel technology.

The steam locomotive, heretofore struggling for breath as Amtrak, is huffing and puffing in the roundhouse.  There never was - and probably never will be - a cheaper, more efficient means of hauling bulk freight long distance.  As the cost of diesel oil and gasoline crawl to a dollar a gallon, coal fired steam gets more attractive to shippers.  Eventually a proper share of market for long-haul steam and short-haul oil will find a balance.

The same goes for steam ships.  As oil becomes too precious to burn and is earmarked for the petrochemical industry, coal-fired ships will help haul it to market.

The electric trolley car once again will speed great numbers of people along our city streets.  Hopefully the trolleys will have rubber tires and travel on a single, elevated rail.  In any event they will be powered by electricity produced by steam driven, coal fired generators.

At home we will enjoy once again the comfortable, even heat of a gravity warm-air coal furnace.  It, too, can't be beat for efficiency even though it is a great nuisance to tend - what with the shoveling of coal, shaking of grates and hauling of ashes.

The basement playroom likely will go the way of gazebos and front porches, an architectural frivolity that was fun for awhile but not really practical.  Basement space will be needed for the big sloping pipes of coal furnace.  For the sacrifice, we will have a fire of whatever will burn, even if electrical blackouts isolate those families with forced air furnaces dependent upon blower motors and spark igniters.

Natural gas pipelines won't be abandoned.  The network is too valuable to let rust in the ground.  The energy companies will put something burnable in them.

Coal gas will flow through existing pipelines just fine.  Manufactured fuel has only half the heat energy of natural gas, but the stuff was used for decades before natural gas came along.

The sophisticates laughed when Governor James Rhodes proposed to produce gas with Ohio coal a few years ago.  They hooted down his bond proposal for energy development.  Even now they deride his suspension of environment regulations to permit the burning of high-sulfur coal by the seven or eight utilities and big industries able to do so in the present fuel emergency.

As the days grow colder and the unemployment rates grow larger, the laughing grows fainter.

Nuclear energy is the only immediate large-scale source of energy, says Zarb.  Yes, disposal of the spent, but still radioactive, uranium is worrisome.  No, there is no danger of atomic explosion.  Perhaps we must make a Faustian bargain with nuclear power, as its critics contend.  The alternative is national economic collapse.

All our worries will be over if we can sustain and control hydrogen fusion.  This is the process that produces sunshine, the original and ultimate source of all energy.  This is the final, God-like creation of power from the nucleus of atoms.

But who can put the sun in a bottle?

The astronomical heat of fusion vaporizes all materials.  Only magnetism can contain the fusion of hydrogen atoms.  A few weeks ago U.S. scientists succeeded in holding a fusion reaction inside a magnetic field for a hundredth of a second.  This was considered a major breakthrough.  Now all we have to do is figure out a way to keep it going for a hundred months or so.

Until then, coal will prevail; and the nation that sends men to the moon will turn its engineering genius to handling and burning coal cheaply, cleanly and conveniently.

Author: Lindsey Williams