We all see the commercials: Washington is killing clean coal with its regulations!
Complete and utter bullshit.
The gas glut is killing coal, displacing it for up to a quarter of US electrical production across the latest full quarter.
So now you see power companies even going to the point of idling coal-fired stations (from the WSJ story):
Sammis is one of a growing number of coal-fired plants that were built to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but now may run only occassionally because of soft demand for electricity and competition from gas-fired plants that are cheaper to run and cleaner to operate.
Coal, says the piece, has been progressively losing out to shale gas for four years now. It's just gone super-critical over the last year. Cheap gas now is half the cost of coal when it comes to generating electricity.
This is why America is going to be exporting our superior coal to Asia in coming years.
And that will be a good thing.