Faltering Coal

Week 13 notes

The news that Kingston Steam Plant (also called Kingston Fossil Plant) suffered greatly from diesel theft at a source mine made me wonder - what real impact would something like that have? Specifically, where does Kingston get its coal from? I’m afraid this scenario may stretch belief a bit, as I don't think Kingston actually has a single source mine. TVA contracts its coal from coal companies and I suspect they would not be so foolish to tie the output of a single mine to a single power plant. Think about coal mining in general – although accidents are more rare than the past, they still happen and an accident can shut a mine down for a substantial amount of time (especially in the East here). But even if there was a 1:1 relationship between mine and plant, if that source mine failed, how many other power plants would get shut down? I did a little research when I got a good Internet connection and found that the following plants are in the Knoxville vicinity:

Kingston Fossil Plant (Harriman)
-supplies 10 billion KWH per year (700,000 homes)
-Consumes 14,000 tons of coal per day

Bull Run (Oak Ridge)
-supplies 6 billion KWH per year (430,000 homes)

John Sevier (Rogersville)
-supplies 5 billion KWH per year (350,000 homes)

All plants burn low-sulfur coal blends which is a way around putting advanced pollution controls on the plants. A little more digging reveals that in 2004 a 3-year contract with Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway paid $39.2 million to ship coal from Wyoming to Kingston Fossil Plant through Memphis. 18 million tons of coal was purchased from Thunder Basin Coal in Wyoming. IF ALL that came to Kingston and ONLY to Kingston, it would be enough to provide 3.5 years of production. The same link (http://www.energybulletin.net/3439.html) says contracts were also signed with Arch Coal for 5.5 million tons and Massy for 5 million tons. These are also low sulfur coal but they are more expensive presumably because its more difficult to mine in the East.

Anyway, some interesting statistics: as of 2004 coal provides 60 % of TVA electricity generation (11 plants); there are 2 other plants that use natural gas (cleaner but likely to be more scarce too) and oil (GULP!!)

Plant & consumption per day (tonnage)
Allen: 7200
Bull Run: 7300
Colbert: 8900
Cumberland: 20000 (this is the biggest one)
Gallatin: 12350
John Sevier: 5700
Johnsonville: 9600 (this is the oldest one)
Kemper: This is a combustion / turbine power plant. As I understand it and mentioned earlier, this is natural gas / oil powered, not coal.
Kingston: 14000
Lagoon Creek: also natural gas / oil powered
Paradise: 20,000 (I think this is the one John Prine wrote about)
Shawnee: 9600
Widows Creek: 10000

Total coal use would be 125,000 per day or 46 million tons per year. Again, I don't know where all this comes from. The 2004 contracts were for low-sulfur coal but its likely they come from a variety of sources and mines.

SADLY, this is going to take more digging (or mining!!) than my busy schedule can afford right now...

(OOG: this is a work a fiction for the worldwithoutoil.org experiment. However the statistics were derived from TVA’s web site.)