North Dakota is facing realities of coal decline

With the closure of the state’s largest power plant and coal mine a certainty in 2022, North Dakota is forced to accept the realities facing a coal industry that has existed since settlement days.

Green River Energy announced recently that it was closing its Coal Creek Station and Falkirk Mine near Underwood in 2022, short notice for a move that will have a significant impact on the and surrounding area.

This closure may be only the first domino to go and sweep away the remaining four plants and six mines working at excavating the massive bed of coal underlying western North Dakota.

Several weeks ago, this column predicted that the North Dakota coal industry would be gone in 50 years. At the time, hopeful advocates of coal mining failed to understand that the prediction was not advocating the closure of the coal industry but suggested that the state government should play a lead role in helping communities through closures.

We can lament leaving 400 billion tons of coal in the ground; the loss of high-paying jobs; dying Main Streets and absorbing the fiscal shocks involved. But the coal industry is doomed by forces beyond our control.

According to comments from a Green River official, reported by Bismarck Tribune, “energy produced from coal has been unable to compete with low-priced wind and natural gas.” North Dakota has no voice in the energy market.

Even though Green River Energy is making efforts to soften the blow, the profit-motivated capitalistic system has little room for mourning the social implications and economic consequences of its actions.

For decades we have refused to believe in the science of earth warming, using quack science to buttress our cause, the realities of its consequences are becoming more clear as each day passes. But because we have a strong economic motive and believe what we want to believe, we will deny it’s reality.

While North Dakotans have a motive to deny earth warming, the rest of the states don’t and are beginning to deal with the environmental crisis. And outside forces hold most of the cards.

Oregon and Washington are ruling out the inclusion of coal in their energy mixes. Minnesota is planning to shut lignite out by 2050. The states in the west and New England have been moving to curtail coal-generated power. Eventually Congress will act.

As earth warming becomes more apparent, public opinion will support more aggressive action.

Since the 1960s, energy companies and the state and federal governments have poured millions and millions of dollars to make coal clean. To suggest the organization of a method by which state and local leaders plan for the worst does not mean that we need abandon efforts to make coal clean. But if we don’t find that silver bullet to make coal clean, the state should be prepared to make the crash less painful.