“Without coal, you might as well turn off half the lights—not just for our favorite games—but for our cities, shops, factories and homes.” Despite calls to phase out coal-generated electricity, said Boyce, the fossil fuel still powers the world’s best economies—may well become the world’s largest energy source this year.
Boyce has advanced “The Peabody Plan”—eliminating energy poverty ensuring 50% of all new generation is coal-based. It would replace older coal-fired plants with advanced technologies, developing 100 major carbon capture and sequestration projects worldwide. The plan would further develop major international coal-to-gas, coal-to-chemicals, and coal-to-liquids initiatives by 2023. Commercialization of new technologies achieving near-zero emissions would also be critical.
The New Orleans outage was ironically tied to the company’s award-winning advertising campaign for sporting events, wherein stadium scoreboards momentarily went without electricity—to show fans coal creates more power than any other fuel.
