It was stated at the alst election that 97% of Ohio's electricity was produced by coal. Obama said he would make it too expensive through regulations to make electricity by burning coal
It's still a hydrocarbon and how long before the radical left wants that taken off the shelf? My son's a chemical engineer and he said the reason the oil has come down is we are now distilling natural gas to make the same things that we use to make with distilling oil. That's got the ME oil producers pissed and they are over producing the oil to get the price to drop so it would be more economical to go back to oil. I say use all forms of energy but don't use our tax dollars to subsidize any form. Make them all stand on their two feet. Don't levy artificial taxes on coal just to make it more expensive. That's my beef with the left, there's no reason to do the things they are doing.
Is natural gas a hydrocarbon? How long before our liberal leaders want to control that by putting taxes and fees on that to make it more expensive?
Not so sure about some of that. Pretty sure it's a supply/demand thing with oil. The world is oversupplied in oil thus the lower price for oil. OPEC is overproducing in an effort to hurt U.S. frackers and they've been quite successful but they're hurting themselves too with the low oil price due to oversupply. Since the price of nat gas is low, I'm sure that the price of distillates made from nat gas are low as well. Constructing the nat gas cracker in WV doesn't make business sense until the price of oil goes back up some.
The problem isn't that it's a hydrocarbon, the problem is all the other byproducts produced from coal burning, such as Sulfur Dioxide, heavy metals like Mercury, and a host of other things.
And it's not just that. Ask the folks in NC, TN or Martin, KY who lived near the fly ash impoundments that broke loose and flooded the valleys with black ash sludge. Those same impoundments were leaching heavy metals into the local groundwater. WV and other coal mining states will be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars that will be needed to reclaim old mining sites as coal companies go bankrupt or find other reasons to not reclaim their mines and that's not counting the mines that will require perpetual treatment for acid or high Selenium mine water discharges. Coal was only "cheap" when the environmental costs were passed onto others.
Keep telling yourself that the liberals don't care about burning gas. They will when they get around to it. Let us pick the winners and losers, not some pointy head bureaucrat i
So naive. Of course "economics" is driving the switch to natural gas. The reason that the economics changed is because regulations has made mining much more expensive if not impossible in some occasions but more importantly the anticipation of new EPA air quality standards made coal unfeasible. To suggest the war on coal doesnt exist is silly. It was successful and now the libtard morons will move to fracking.