How is Trump going to make America great again?

Why would there be? None of us here are a part of his administration.

So if Trump unleashes coal mining and fossil fuel drilling, won't market forces put an end to coal once and for all? Who will the unemployed coal miners blame then? Or is he planing on artificially propping the coal industry up?

Coal is going the way of the dinosaur, and it's downright cruel for him to promise to bring this industry back, the same as with the propping of Detroit's car industry.

The dinosaurs spent millions of years going away.

The U.S. has a 200 year supply of coal and we export quite a bit of it.

If we can get another 100 years out of coal as a major extractive industry in the U.S. I'll be more than happy.

Plus strip mining plays a major role in the development of larger and larger dump trucks (some of more than 420 tons capacity) and I find such vehicles immensely interesting and fascinating.

You don't get that from solar panels or windmills.

Not anti-trade, it was anti infinite trade deals in which US bends over table and takes it up ass instead of negotiating to get the best deal we can at the moment.

But you are right about Trump being anti globalist-elites. Quick digression, I spent most of the 80s in business schools, learning the religious orthodoxy of free-market capitalism and things like comparative advantage and I absorbed academia's certainty. Turns out they omitted a couple of key points. Saw NAFTA in '94 and the impending worldwide GATT, and cheered that my religion was the dogma of the day pretty much throughout the US, on both left and right.
But those key omissions have presented over the decades - globalized economies appreciably benefited just two groups - it substantially improved lives of the poorest populations in the third world, and it slightly improved lives of the super rich owners and top execs in the multi-national companies. Turns out, everyone else gets hosed unless you measure results over the span of centuries or unless you consider poor Chinese and Indonesians and Indians the responsibility of the US taxpayer/consumer. A second omission is more like a lie of optimism: turns out the Chinese et al. never became this big open market that we'd be able to sell all our new service economy products into.

Here's a vid from a Super Capitalist, one of my free-market baron heroes of the last century, foretelling some consequences of the largesse of America in making the poorest mud-dwellers on the planet richer at the expense of US jobs and a gutted middle-class. Skip to 1:40 and play around 5-6 minutes, he's a highly credible source (practically Nixon to China).

And what happens after 200 years if there's nothing else in place?

That's what short term thinkers don't seem to care about.

We only have one planet. All the money in the world means nothing without clean water to drink, a shrinking food supply when the bees become an endangered species and climate change throws the whole world outta whack.

But Natural gas is even more plentiful and a lot cheaper.

How can the coal industry compete?

I've read about the bee problem in Successful Farming. There is no consensus about what has caused the die off of bees.

And water has gotten cleaner even as coal burning has increased.

If you're worried about the long term why aren't you marching in the street DEMANDING more nuclear powerplants?

Natural gas is not cheaper than coal, and possibly never will be.

A ton of coal contains roughly the same energy as 5.25 barrels of oil or 30,000 SCF of natural gas.

A ton of Appalachian coal costs about $45 delivered.
30,000 SCF of natural gas by major pipeline is $68. For commercial customers it's $250.
5.25 barrels of oil would be $200 to $300.

And coal can be stockpiled at virtually no cost because you can pile it on the ground. Storing natural gas is an extremely expensive proposition.

Plus natural gas requires deep drilling while most coal is surface mined.

https://btuanalytics.com/coal-to-gas-switching-in-2016/

It's also a lot cheaper to ship a ton of natural gas than a ton of coal.

Link

Not to actually "ship" it. Shipping natural gas is an expensive proposition. Shipping coal takes a barge.

The problem with using natural gas for base load is that natural gas prices are very spiky. Just in your graph they've ranged from $2.00 to almost $13.00 per MMBtu. That's because the producers (the wells) and the users (the power plants) are connected together by a gas pipe. When prices are low there's little incentive to drill new wells. If supply starts to fall short while demand is high, the price goes up very quickly and stays up while new wells are drilled and pipeline sections added. With coal the guys increase production by working an extra shift, plus all the power plants have mountains of coal piled up beside them, making the system extremely robust.



If you hook your economy (electricity prices) entirely to the above graph, you're going to have a very bumpy ride.

But the BTU Analytics link says that storage levels for natural gas are extremely high.

For now. But storage is a function of the supply over the demand. If supply has exceeded demand then there's not much incentive to try and increase the supply until demand catches up, because it costs money to store natural gas (the cheapest way, ironically, is to pump it back in the ground, because pressure vessels cost a shit ton of money).



Our storage is fluctuating between about 1.6 trillion cubic feet to 4 trillion cubic feet. In the winter we use 3 trillion cubic feet a month and in summer about 1.5 trillion cubic feet a month. So our storage will cover about a month to a month and a half of consumption. But we're also wanting to switch from coal to natural gas, which will double consumption. There's not a lot of buffer there.

And our production and consumption wasn't much different a few years ago when the price was $13.00 instead of $2.00.

As you take coal out of the power equation, demand for natural gas becomes even more inelastic because people must have electricity, whatever the price, and there isn't an idle coal plant they can fire up because as those are taken offline we box them up and ship them to China.

So while the price is $2.00 everything looks fine and dandy, but a quick glance at the recent historical prices says this situation might change, and change quickly with just the slightest imbalance.

What sort of stores do you run?

As long as we have need for steel, there will always be need for coal.

One of those gets you a lot more energy for the cost.

= : enty : (spaces removed)

Oh, we can always switch to charcoal for steel production. It's renewable!

Two kinds. Three 24-hour Mexican diners (full service with drive thru), and one greasy spoon American diner just lunch/dinner. Have a plan (but ACA made it bad use of money) to open one of each, already have a location for the first. Thanks.

But you've gone from "Natural gas is not cheaper than coal, and possibly never will be" to "So while the price is $2.00 everything looks fine and dandy, but a quick glance at the recent historical prices says this situation might change..."

Unless they confiscate companies and imprison shareholders for hiring illegals then they will never stop the illegal alien scum.

Aha! That's why you don't want a taco truck on every corner!

It's just almost competitive with coal at present low prices when you consider the costs of construction and that the EPA is preventing new coal plants from being built and shuttering hundreds of existing ones.

Put a coal plant near the mine mouth, like we do in Kentucky, and you can produce electricity a lot cheaper than you can by shipping the coal to the North East.

For a fuel comparison, gas is running $1.70 to $2.80 an mmBTU, depending on location (pipelines and such figure into the prices, just as railroads figure in to coal prices). Central Appalachian coal shipped to New England is costing about $1.77 per mmBTU, but Powder River coal is about $0.37 per mmBTu. Gas at current prices is more than competitive when used in some areas in combined cycle plants, and those plants typically cost about a third as much in capital costs to construct. Generally they look at 30-years of operation for calculating the final cost to product electricity, such as you see here.



There, natural gas (second from right) looks great at current prices. The problem is that natural gas prices can jump way up, and were about seven times higher during several recent periods. That would bump natural gas to the very top of the chart as the most expensive option out of everything shown. Of course if it did that everybody would drill and frack like mad to make lots of money, but a lot depends on where the long term equilibrium ends up. Shifting the bulk of our electricity generation to natural gas is going to favor a higher gas price.

I'm at a loss, you guys (Quest, mburtonk), I'm an avowed free trader who now has the benefit of seeing three decades of what globalization has wrought - fewer and fewer jobs and static or shrinking wages. Sir Jimmy in the video in 1994 back then was expressing the exact same medium term trend - static or falling wages, which we've now seen again for a decade.

I understand those days are behind us where the US has a large manufacturing economy, and that we must adapt. And that producing services is largely our future (a nation of 'nail polishers,' as one friend put it). But it's pretty clear that on a global scale, the very top and the very bottom has benefitted while most of rest have stagnated (except we have some cheaper consumer goods). That's a helluva tradeoff, in hindsight.

I don't know if Donald will get us equal and fair access to those markets. I suspect he won't foment a trade war, he's not *that* poor at business (look at how adroitly he's used the bankruptcy code to shed debt in times of decline). I *do* think he'll attempt to contain some of the unfettered globalism that has hurt this country's middle class.

If we agree that capitalism shouldn't be unfettered (e.g. anti-trust), then why should our devotion to globalism leave that unfettered? What's keeping us there besides academic dogma (which I'll admit I've been guilty of too).

Have I told you my idea that economic theory screwed up by assuming that competitive advantage was relatively fixed (determined by local conditions) and thus couldn't be boxed up, shipped, and commoditized as easily as a crate of bananas? That turns out to be largely wrong.