"The Coal Age Nears Its End", and so does the gasoline era?

..."Inexpensive natural gas is the biggest threat to coal," says Jone-Lin Wang, head of global power research for IHS CERA, a research company. "Nothing else even comes close."

For decades, coal produced more electricity than all other fuels combined, and as recently as 2003 accounted for almost 51% of net electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

But its share has dropped sharply in the last couple of years. It fell to 43% for the first nine months of 2011, as natural gas's share has jumped to almost 25% from under 17% in 2003...

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Coal-fired plants in north central Texas and on the Gulf Coast are also a problem. A 1971 clause to the Clean Air Act exempted older plants from having to comply with certain pollution control regulations, thereby allowing many of these "grandfathered" plants in Texas to continue operating without pollution control devices.(8) Furthermore, Texas has done little at the state level to impose stricter standards on these facilities. Legislation in 1999 offered incentives to grandfathered facilities to voluntarily clean up their emissions, but it did not require them to do so.(9) So these operations continue to pump out pollution, much of which are sulfur emissions which account for nearly 40 percent of the pollutants reducing visibility in Big Bend. Other particulate pollution contributing to the haze includes: organic carbon (19 %) from wildfires, agricultural burning, and vehicles; coarse material or blowing soil (16%); and nitrate from nitrous oxides produced by industry and vehicles (4%).(10)

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On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency threw back the curtain on its big new regulation to limit mercury emissions and other toxic pollution from coal-fired power plants. As David Roberts writes, this is potentially a very big deal from a public-health perspective, as the rule is expected to “save tens of thousands of lives every year and prevent birth defects, learning disabilities, and respiratory diseases.”

Indeed, the EPA estimates that the regulation will produce $37 billion to $90 billion in health benefits by 2016 (compared with clean-up costs of about $9.6 billion). Confusingly, though, most of these estimated benefits don’t actually come from reducing mercury pollution. So where do they come from? And just how big a deal are these rules?

First, some background. Plenty of evidence suggests that mercury — a neurotoxin — inflicts quite a bit of harm on the public. A 2005 study in Environmental Health Perspectives, for instance, looked at the effects of mercury poisoning on the brains of fetuses. It found that 637,000 babies were born each year with significant amounts of mercury in their bloodstream, with about two-thirds of those kids suffering IQ loss. The authors estimated that the lost economic productivity due to decreased intelligence came to about $8.7 billion per year, with $1.3 billion of that attributable to power plants.

Oddly enough, though, when the EPA calculated benefits from its new pollution rule, mercury only played a minuscule role, mainly for technical reasons (more on that below). The vast majority of that estimated $37 billion to $90 billion in benefits comes from a reduction in premature deaths — about 11,000 per year by 2016 — caused by particulate matter, not mercury. As utilities install scrubbers at coal plants to sop up mercury, they also end up curbing other types of pollutants, especially lung-damaging particulates, and this “co-benefit” accounts for about $36 billion to $89 billion of the estimated benefits...

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The amount of electricity generated using coal in the U.S. slid to its lowest level since at least 1970 in November, according to data released this week by the Energy Information Administration. Coal-fired power plants generated 29 percent of the U.S. electric power supply in November, dropping from nearly 35 percent in July and 39 percent for all of 2014...

(since July 2015) natural gas has been America’s largest source of electricity...

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This article gives the essential facts about how America is already phasing out coal, to generate electricity.

What it does not report, is that oil is a much more expensive fuel than coal or natural gas, per unit of energy.

Oil currently costs 5-6 times as much as NG, in the USA, for the equivalent energy.

If these fuel costs remain at anywhere near current ratios, "Inexpensive natural gas is the biggest threat to" gasoline, as well, and most vehicles will soon be running on NG, either directly, by burning it in ICEVs, or even more efficiently, by converting it into electricity in power plants first, and charging BEVs with the electricity generated...

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