Energy secretary visits Consol, touts innovations in coal products
By the time U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette arrived Friday morning at Consol Energy’s Pennsylvania Mining Complex, he was already a fan of its work.
Coal, the secretary wrote in an op-ed for PennLive earlier this week, “is essential to this nation.” The use of coal should be expanded, he argued, not phased out.
Citing the increase in coal exports in recent years, Mr. Brouillette wrote: “You should be proud that Pennsylvania is playing such an important role in the expansion of American coal.”
Consol Energy, the Cecilbased miner that operates the largest underground mine complex in North America, exported 33% of its volumes last year, mostly to India. It sent the rest to domestic power plants.
But that’s not what brought Mr. Brouillette to southwestern
Pennsylvania. It’s Consol’s experiments with not burning coal — a small but unique chunk of the company’s efforts.
Mr. Brouillette used that as a backdrop to announce that $122 million in funding will be made available for private-public partnerships involved in turning coal into products.
He hopes it will involve companies like Consol working with researchers at universities to assess whether making things out of coal can make financial sense.
Late last year, Consol announced it had invested $5 million and taken a 25% equity interest in CFoam Corp., a subsidiary of an Australian firm whose business is to commercialize a coal-based structural material developed in a research lab in West Virginia.
The company had also been working with Omnis Bailey LLC, a venture that’s building a refinery to convert waste coal into a cleaner fuel and a mineral product to be spread on soil. With the pilot phase completed, Omnis is close to finishing the first of eight planned modules in the commercial refinery, the company said Friday.
On another front, Consol is working with Ohio University to turn coal into construction products.
“I saw decking made from 70% coal and 30% plastic,” Mr. Brouillette said after his tour Friday.
The Omnis Bailey refinery reminded him of the hulking metal towers back home in Louisiana, he said, meaning it was the real deal.
“If they can develop that technology and scale it up, it represents a unique marketing opportunity,” he said. “I was a bit surprised to see those types of technologies being developed right there.”
The question is will any of that be enough to save an industry that has been on the decline for more than a decade and is in a particularly vulnerable state today?
The nation’s largest private mining company, St. Clairsville, Ohio-based Murray Energy Inc., is in bankruptcy. Tennesseebased Contura Energy Inc., which itself formed from the juicier parts of bankrupt miner Alpha Natural Resources, announced earlier this week that the large Cumberland Mine in Greene County is no longer economic and would be marketed for sale.
Coal’s competitor, natural gas, is taking ever-bigger chunks of electricity supply. But it has also spawned a rush of industry eager to use its components to make products.
That’s the driving force behind the massive petrochemical complex being built in Potter, Beaver County. That Shell Chemical facility will turn ethane — a component of natural gas — into plastic pellets that will then go on to be transformed into everyday products.
Coal’s non-combustion uses have thus far been less lucrative.
Researchers, including those at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in South Park and Morgantown, W.Va., have been working on these, problems for years. They’ve surveyed the geology, experimented with extracting rare earth elements from coal and coal ash, and tried to make carbon fiber from coal.
Mr. Brouillette said he envisions the new funding opportunity, which will likely be available in August, as complementing and building on those efforts.
And he encouraged people to broaden their thinking about energy sources like coal as a national security issue — not just as a fuel, but as a source of other materials necessary for defense applications.
With that, Mr. Brouillette wedged coal into a popular discussion in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic: that critical supplies and products should be made in the U.S.
Most recently, the focus has been on personal protective equipment and pharmaceuticals. But the secretary said he’s also concerned the vast majority of the rare earth materials needed for critical technology applications comes from China. Those same materials are used in battery storage technologies.
“If we’re going to continue the transition to cleaner fuels, and if any of those are dependent upon battery technologies for storage, what we want to do is protect that supply chain,” he said.