At the same time, it will retrofit two other coal facilities there next year.
Romney hopes all this concern helps him in the Buckeye swing state and in other coal communities.
"It opened up a fissure and allowed gas in from other coal seams outside Tower's control, " he said.
He soon broke ranks with utility executives by supporting a cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide and other coal-plant pollutants.
Other coal companies have drifted out West to the Powder River Basin, where the coal lies right at your feet.
It's a message that could resonate in Ohio and other coal-producing states.
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Other coal producers started backing out of that market a decade ago, as their customers, the steel companies, suffered from an onslaught of cheap foreign steel.
They began to fall this year, like those of just about every other coal company in the country as seen here in a stock chart featuring Alliance, Alpha Natural Resources ( ANR), Peabody Energy ( BTU), Walter Energy ( WLT) and Arch Coal ( ACI).
But the other trend is that the price of coal and other fossil fuels are going up.
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On the other hand, coal and natural gas plants do not hold the same potential for a single catastrophic failure event.
On the other hand, coal is likely to be in for a tough time regardless of which party rules the White House and Congress.
When combined with other restrictions on coal ash and cooling water EPA is planning, capacity losses will more likely be somewhere between 3.5% and 7%.
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Natural gas has other advantages over coal: It produces far fewer emissions of toxic chemicals and gases that contribute to climate change, key attributes as tougher environmental rules go into effect.
By reducing our reliance on coal, the shale-gas boom helped push U.S. carbon emissions in the first quarter of 2012 to their lowest point since 1992 reflecting fewer emissions not just of carbon but of other byproducts of coal combustion that kill tens of thousands of people a year.
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Kinder says he's looking for other pipeline partnerships to buy, and Kinder Morgan is expanding into terminals that handle coal and other dry bulk materials, hoping to capitalize on long-term trends such as the shift by electric utilities away from Appalachian coal toward cleaner- burning western coal.
If the EPA adopts the proposals that such green groups as the Natural Resources Defense Council are lobbying for, utilities that phase out their coal operations early would generate credits they could sell to other operators to keep their coal plants running longer.
Prices on iron ore, copper, coal and other minerals are nearing all-time highs.
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Alpha has trailed indexes of coal and other energy stocks by 30 to 70 percentage points over the past year.
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Yet these impacts are dwarfed by the ongoing havoc wreaked by coal and other fossil fuels, even putting aside climate change.
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Another way of thinking about it is the output of manufacturing industry minus any influence from oil, coal or other mining industries.
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Chemicals may be a low-margin game, but when you transform coal and other substances into liquid fuels there are huge chemical runoffs.
In the 1970s industrial users could switch to oil or electricity, and utilities had other choices, including coal, hydroelectric and even nuclear power.
Part of the problem is weakening growth in exports, driven largely by a recent drop in the price of coal and other commodities that Indonesia sells overseas.
In the 19th century, the British set up a factory in Dundee, Scotland, to process raw jute into yarn before weaving it into bags for storing coal and other commodities.
Craig Venter (famed for his work on decoding the human genome) are collaborating on a study of naturally occurring organisms that live in oil, natural gas, coal and other underground hydrocarbon formations.
During gasification, the carbon dioxide generated from the coal or other feedstock, like biofuels, is captured and then used to inject deep into the earth as part of oil recovery or otherwise sequestered in a geologic formation.
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While the big deepwater ships that carry huge quantities of the nation's iron ore, coal and other goods are able to steam the deep waters of the Great Lakes as they always have, they must carry ever lighter loads to avoid grounding on the increasingly shallow harbors where they unload.
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With coal and other fossil-fuels driving carbon dioxide emissions to their highest levels in history, ours is a generation preparing for a world that will be deeply and irrevocably impacted by climate change a world plagued by severe heat waves, floods, droughts, and record wildfires, and the potential displacement of millions of people.
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Other European utilities used more coal also, likely reversing a recent trend of carbon reductions.
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Meanwhile, falling coal prices and other factors are undermining the economic logic behind surface mining.
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