As long as companies dont have to pay for "environmental woes", they will profit from doing things that harm/kill us.

Will scrubbers be enough? I hope so.

But 50% of our electricity still comes from burning coal. Should we be burning coal at all anymore given what we now know about global warming? Does anyone think about the legacy we are leaving our grandchildren? A lot of attention is paid to China's coal plants but we need to fix things at home before we start telling others what to do if we ever hope to see change.

High-Sulfur Coal Has Investors Glowing

By GREGORY ZUCKERMAN

April 24, 2006

For years, coal with high sulfur content meant lots of pollution. Soon, however, it could bring investors something else entirely: big profits.

High-sulfur coal long has drawn fire largely because it can lead to acid rain and other environmental woes, proving costly to electric utilities and other coal buyers. Many utilities have preferred low-sulfur coal coming from regions such as Wyoming's Powder River Basin, even though the high-sulfur coal often is found in areas that are closer to where coal-reliant power plants operate and high-sulfur coal burns hotter, enabling it to generate more electricity.

With environmental rules becoming more stringent, however, and the cost of purchasing pollution-emission credits soaring, utilities have been spending big money fitting their power plants with so-called scrubbers, or seven-story facilities placed adjacent to smokestacks that capture the sulfur as it comes out of the plants. Thanks to these scrubbers, electric utilities increasingly are able to use even the highest sulfur coal without causing the same pollution problems.

That is making companies that sell high-sulfur coal, especially Consol Energy Inc., more likely to grab market share from coal competitors in the next few years. And that makes their shares attractive, some investors say.

...

"We're spending almost $4 billion as a company on various environmental plans, mostly for scrubbers, in the last few years, so we might as well go for" the cheaper, high-sulfur coal, says Vince Stroud, vice president of commercial fuels at Duke, which signed a multiyear contract with Consol earlier this year. "Everyone is looking at the same math. There are environmental reasons and there are good economic reasons" to spend money on scrubbers and then turn to high-sulfur coal.

About half of electricity output in the U.S. comes from coal-fired plants, though high-sulfur coal is unlikely to capture the entire market. Some power plants were built to burn only one type of coal, making it harder to switch. And many utilities say they have been disappointed with the performance of railroads, a main mode of transporting coal, making it harder to switch to high-sulfur coal, at least in the next couple of years. The potential shift by power producers to high-sulfur coal could come at the expense of players, like Massey Energy, which sell coal from the Central Appalachian area, said Mr. Stroud of Duke Energy.