U.S.'s coal future: If not power generation, how about 'in products?'

By Brice Wallace 

For parts of the U.S. that rely on coal production to support their local economies, Steven Winberg has some encouraging words.

Speaking at the recent Utah Economic and Energy Summit in Salt Lake City, Winberg, assistant secretary for fossil energy at the U.S. Department of Energy, acknowledged that coal-fired power generation stations are aging and power companies are moving toward using more renewable sources. But coal can remain part of the nation’s and world’s energy future, he said.

“There has been no shortage of discussion about leaving fossil energy in the ground, whether it’s coal, oil, natural gas, [and] a lot of discussion about fracking and whether or not we ought to be doing that anymore,” Winberg said.

But the U.S. has become energy-independent and is exporting oil and liquid natural gas.

“For those people that think we ought to just leave it in the ground and move on, I would suggest to you there’s another pathway forward, and that is taking and maintaining a leadership role in technology development,” he said.

Technologies being advanced by the Department of Energy will “allow us to maintain an all-of-the-above energy strategy,” he said, noting that the “energy future cuts across all forms of energy.”

One technology involves using coal to make things — for example, a house’s back deck — rather than burning in a power plant.

“We all know there is tremendous pressure on coal-fired power generation, and the vast majority of the coal that we mine in the United States goes towards coal-fired generation,” Winberg said. “But the coal fleet is aging, so we need to find another use for coal, and that’s coal to products.”

The coal-to-products technology aims to use coal’s carbon value instead of its heating value to make products such as carbon fiber; carbon nanodots — which can be used for bioimaging, solar cells, photocatalysis and sensor applications — materials used in 3D printing; and building materials that could be used as substitutes for ceramic roofing tile, wallboard and decking material.

“We can build all of that out of coal, again using the carbon value, not the heating value, of coal,” Winberg said.

If the Department of Energy can reduce the costs of the technology, it could mean an increase in U.S. coal production of 300 million to 400 million tons. For comparison, about 550 million tons will be mined this year for power generation.

“That [technology] would be game-changing for a lot of coal communities across this country,” Winberg said.

Another use for coal involves extracting rare-earth elements from coal and coal byproducts. Winberg explained that ash left over from burning or gasifying coal and byproducts increases the concentration of rare-earth elements and critical minerals that can be extracted. As much as 11 million tons of rare-earth elements could come from coal and coal byproducts, he said.

And while large coal-fired power generation plants might be on the way out, Winberg envisions smaller, modular stations with the flexibility to ramp up or down very quickly, as needed, “when the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing.”

Those stations likely will be able to burn coal, biomass, waste plastics and other fuels. They could produce hydrogen, do it with net negative CO2 emissions and do it cost-efficiently, he said.

All of those technologies and more could help the U.S. and other nations move to a new energy future, depending on “how quickly we want to go and how deep we want to make our greenhouse gas reductions,” Winberg said. And the U.S. can be at the forefront of that technology development, he stressed.

“Whatever the course and whatever the speed under which we do that,” he said, “we will need these critical minerals, and this administration believes that those critical minerals can best be produced here in the United States so that we have them to guide us through the energy transition and to have them so we can export them to our friends and allies around the world, and mostly so we are not dependent on minerals coming from countries that don’t have our interest at heart.”