Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The West’s coal giant is going down...

What did I miss. They are working on a new contract with the tribes. The tribes want more. Power Co. doesn't want to pay more. So announce your shutting down. Power play? Just trying to read between the lines.

N.G. i think is just cheaper with less issue.
few years ago the big utility in arizona Arizona Public Service shut down a really old generating station at childs, so a dinky fish could live in peace. Lots of stuff to get them to do that.
what a lot of people don't know is in exchange for doing that, they got permission to put in a N.G. fired generation station in s.w. phoenix.
This is going to be a huge hit on the navajo, and hopi, and related small towns in the north. There are not a lot of jobs up there. The tribes in arizona control a lot of the water rights by the way in arizona, and i can see steady increases coming in the central arizona project canal water as time goes by. Kind of the red man's revenge.

Jonathan Thompson may have taken a tour of some eastern and upper mid-western cities as a preview to form this story. Such shutdowns due to demand/supply, relative costs and eco issues made wastelands - now standing ghost areas - of many sites where industry/jobs once flourished. Not a new story at all - simply different ingredients.

my thoughts also, could be negotiating tactic. they are expecting the tribes to increase the ask for a) the land, b) the water, c) the coal.

although operating a big ass plant like that in order to lose money on every acre-foot pumped has got to hurt.

buying power off the grid can bite you too, remember the Enron run-up? with those long term delivery contracts when everything was going up?

Sycamore

High County News was started n Wyoming many years ago, pretty much in opposition to a strip coal mine, I think.

It has a very environmental focus/slant/bent whatever you want to call it. It does have interesting stories from across the west.

Page will be semi-deserted seasonal tourist town like Kanab is, without that power plant. Maybe crossed with Winslow, because it will still be a border town with shopping, etc.

Sycamore

Enviros are a substantial player in this, too.
PNM asked to upgrade the scrub systems, and got shut down - because the State regulators said it "cost too much"!
I'll always wonder who got paid under the table and/or what shady backroom dealings led to that whole fiasco.

The market will decide coal vs natural gas here in the U.S. - Coal is a money maker when we export it.

Dad helped build that plant and I was out there in '74 during Memorial Day weekend. The plant was still under construction at that time. Went thru the dam at Page, drove over to the north rim of the Grand Canyon, went to Zion National Park, and saw some of the fattest cattle you could ever imagine and there wasn't a blade of grass to be seen.

Sure is a lot different than down here in La.

There is a good story on this subject in the Albuquerque Journal, this morning.
Starts on page B10.

I am old enough to remember page before the bridge over the river was put in, and the grand opening of that bridge. The navajo practiced indiscriminate grazing for sheep, and indiscriminate cutting of trees
for firewood/shelter for many many years. I use to comment driving through the rez to utah you could always tell when you were off the rez, it was like a line in the sand. One side vegetation, the other side nada. Fredonia and then knab sit on a plateau. if you take the other road over to there other than from page, you pass the arizona state buffalo ranch, and where those california condors were released. I was told by a friend, at the time high up in the agricultural depart. of the state, a lot of the available leased and private land traditionally used for cattle was being bought up by environmental groups to run the cattle off the land.
That area known as "the strip" north of the canyon has trophy deer like you wouldn't believe. I have driven that road after dark from the canyon up to fredonia, and all you see are hundreds of eyes lining the highway from the deer. Some mighty content lion up there too. there has been talk of a depravation hunt for buffalo, seems the buff on the state ranch don't respect those wire fences and get out. Talk of issuing tags for them.
Page if i remember correctly has become to some extent a retirement area in some ways, golf courses and the like. This is bound to have an effect as a city where there are few cities to buy stuff at.

Am I the ony one skeptical about the longterm low prices of NG. NG drilling was huge in this state a few years ago. As soon as prices fell, drilling stopped and wells are capped. Supply will be suppressed untill prices go up. Then, slowly, caps will be opened and wells drilled. Call it greed or self preservation. Unlike some here I do not believe in the innate goodness of big oil/gas. Not saying they are bad really, just money driven

a lot of stuff was capped and drilling exploration shut down with the fall in oil/energy prices over the last number of years. I just saw brother in law yesterday,,, who did have a pretty good job in wyoming until the outfit he worked for shutdown. I don't believe it will stay that way forever, and i have already seen some recovery in prices of companies publically traded that focus in this area.

And it is necessary for those companies to keep supply/prices at a certain level. But when I hear how cheap NG is, they are not going to let that stand. Prices will rise untill volume suffers, that will then be the price zone. Nobody would go to work and run at top speed if doing so decreased his paycheck. Big oil is both the Company and the Union, they gots all da marbles.

I don't know the term for it in economics, but to some extent, NG is produced as a secondary product to drilling and fracking for oil.

So you would be correct if most NG is produced by NG only exploration and drilling. I agree that any commodity price is subject to market forces AND manipulation, see my above comments about ENRON.

fuel handling is a big expense, and a liquid or gas beats a solid, everyday. and this plant is 100 miles from the mine. So while NG costs may not stay low, neither will the costs of producing and transporting the coal for this plant.

Sycamore

A couple things come to mind.
1. This article and others allude to coal no longer being economically feasible.
Is that something Obama altered with his EPA? Recall that candidate Obama promised back in 2008 that coal will no longer to be feasible once he had control.
So, what EPA regulations might be rescinded as being prejudicial to coal rather than "necessary"?

2. The abrupt move to close seems to be due to a failure in bargaining a new deal with the local tribes. What percent of the decision is based on this failure rather than the EPA induced economic pressure?

3. Shutting down in 2019 doesn't give any realistic time to replace that facility other than contracting for power from other neighboring sources. Still, NG seems to be a viable alternative.

4. While [bleep] has been a black eye for nuclear power, that plant is very old technology - built with a slide ruler. The president engineering with the nuclear is astounding. The spent rule rods everyone lost sleep over, now housed in Paducah, KY., can be re-used for decades of power. Other methods of extraction of power plus new engineering for cooling is a hallmark to American technology. The problem is people denounce nuclear because of, Chernobyl and [bleep], while understanding nothing of the engineer advancements.

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and [bleep] were all built by engineers, and those engineers swore up and down, left and right, backwards and forwards they were safe. Nothing would ever happen.

These new designs are designed by engineers, and they swear up and down, left and right, backwards and forwards they will be safe.

I personally know some of these engineers. They are design-blind, in love with their pet project, and will sharpen the pencil any time their pet gets skewered. The designs will ALWAYS look perfect. On paper. Then a black swan event like the tsunami will hit and we're screwed again.

Market forces really had little to do with the price of coal. Since 2008, it's been politically and legally driven by a multipronged, multimillion dollar "Beyond Coal" campaign.
First, T Boone Pickens and Aubrey MCLendon got in bed with Sierra to promote gas as a "bridge" fuel until the windmills and solar panels would be built (and T Bone had investments in wind, looking for the subsidies and the cash).
But then along came fracking, which made NG look like a long-term play (Marvelous Marcellus) instead of a temporary deal, and the Greens hate all kinds of fossil fuels.
In the meantime, the attacks against permitting new generation of coal by Earthjustice et al put some crazy business risks before the investors. At least an NG plant could be built and the price spikes passed onto consumers. Not true for a failed coal project.
Not building plants means no replacement capacity as older plants are retired, killing the long-term market for coal. Not because of price, but because of political risk, risk which can never be rationalized or dealt with using logic or actual market thinking.

I think it's a shame that the Four Corners plant and mines are being closed down. Those jobs are night and day for those towns, and the plant hasn't had what could be called bona-fide health effects. The water was going to steam, to spin turbines, so what's going to replace that? I understand that NG turbines are combustion turbines, but gas isn't going to be dirt cheap forever.

So everyone on the payroll has a doctorate? Why?

I remember driving thru Paige in the 90's and thinking about Abby's quote from "Voice Crying in the Wilderness" on the same as I drove thru.
Not sure it was a fair assessment.
Would like to go back to see it again.
Water, Coal, Oil, Natural Gas, Open Land, and Politics, all ingredients in what makes the West so interesting.

You aren't a forward thinking person evidently. You don't think engineers can learn from other events and improve on a process or procedure. With thinking like that, we never would have crossed the prairies in buckboards and on foot.