Energy Secretary Visits Coal Country: Urges Coal Industry to Support President's Energy Bill

Jul 09 - Charleston Gazette, The

Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman visited Quincy on Thursday morning to urge West Virginians to back President George W. Bush's energy legislation.

"The energy legislation before Congress right now would take a number of critical steps toward ensuring secure, stable supplies of energy to fuel our 21st-century economy.

"There are provisions that would promote the resurgence of nuclear power," Bodman said. "This country has not had a new nuclear power plant in 30 years."

Some of the bill's important provisions focus on the use of coal and clean-coal technologies.

"We have enough coal to last a couple of centuries," Bodman told the audience of about 75 people, which included Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, and Charles and Nelson Jones of Amherst Industries, a barge business that moves coal, chemicals, limestone, sand and gravel along the Kanawha and Ohio rivers.

Bodman said the new bill includes a provision to spend $2 billion over the next 10 years "to promote research into clean-coal technologies, including cutting-edge coal gasification technology ... with little-to-no emissions of hazardous air pollutants.

"It is critical to the future of coal that Congress act now," Bodman said. "We need to get it to the president's desk by the end of July."

Recent efforts to pass comprehensive new energy legislation have failed, Bodman added.

The U.S. Senate approved an energy bill on June 28, 85-12, that includes $2.2 billion in tax incentives to put clean-coal technologies in wider use.

Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., helped write those new tax incentive provisions in the Senate bill, which would include new technologies to transform coal into natural gas.

Byrd's clean-coal technology provisions are not included in the version of the new energy bill that recently passed the House of Representatives. Differences between the two versions will be discussed in an upcoming Senate-House conference committee.

Bodman spoke in front of the offices of Progress Energy's coal- loading and synfuel processing plant on the banks of the Kanawha River. A banner at the podium read, "Energizing America for Energy Security."

Mike Williams, a senior vice president of Progress, introduced Bodman.

Based in Raleigh, N.C., Progress is the nation's largest producer of coal-based synfuels and has claimed more than $1 billion in tax credits under Section 29 of the Crude Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act of 1980.

Congress hoped to encourage entrepreneurs to develop new kinds of fuel, such as squeezing oil from shale or producing ethanol from corncobs.

But in late 1998 and early 1999, a handful of utilities began spraying already-marketable coal with diesel fuel emulsions or pine tars, claiming that created the "chemical change" the act required.

Asked whether the coal synfuels produced at the Quincy site help promote U.S. energy independence, Williams said he was "not in a position" to comment on that issue.

Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., accompanied Bodman during his visit to Quincy.

Capito, who also supports the new energy bill, said, "We are the energy providers for a lot of the country.... The energy bill is a jobs bill for West Virginia and will do a lot about clean coal."

Capito predicted, "The high price of gasoline ... is going to be the impetus to get the bill hammered out in [the Senate-House] conference and passed."

To contact staff writer Paul J. Nyden, use e-mail or call 348- 5164.