THERE'S a new pork barrel in Washington, and this one is filled with coal. Illinois is off to a good start in the competition for the demonstration grants that probably will determine which region leads the' way in the development of synthetic fuels made from coal.
Coal-related technologies were part of the sudden rapid increase in the federal budget for energy R & D (research and development). Illinois companies and sites are bidding for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts that can be translated into more jobs in the future for Illinois engineers, Scientists - and miners.
The politics of coal
Other coal states are not without their own clout. The Senate Republican leader is from Pennsylvania. The Democratic senators from West Virginia occupy influential positions, and the governor of that state is a Republic
No op can tell how the politics of coal is S aping up these days, because the Office e of Coal Research (OCR) is being a orbed by a new consolidated agency the Energy Research and Development Administration (ER DA). The Interior Department bureaucracy was dedicated to the establishment of a coordinated national coal research laboratory, the big prize that Sen. Adlai E Stevenson and Gov. Dan Walker have been eyeing all along for Illinois. The new executives of ERDA could have something different in mind.
Complicating the situation is the fact that it will take at least a decade to apply the new technology and the industrial developers are waiting to see what happens to the world price of oil before making any commitments. They also are waiting for assurances-that the government is prepared to support the necessarily high prices of oil-and-gas made-from-coal.
In the meantime the coal industry complains that federal policy is working at cross purposes. Speeches are delivered and reports issued about the urgency of conversion from petroleum to coal. And yet most of what happens in Washington distresses Carl Bagge, the former railroad lawyer from Chicago who resigned from the Federal Power Commission to become lobbyist for the coal companies.
Electric power plants don't like to make long-term arrangements for the purchase of "dirty" (i.e. high-sulfur) coal of the sort mined in Illinois. While Richard Nixon was President, his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) disagreed with the administration's policy that utilities should not be required to install costly "scrubber" systems. Now the Ford administration has come around to EPA's position, but has granted the companies an extra five years to complete the installation, by 1985. Money that could have been devoted to scrubber technology was used instead by the utilities to advertise their contention that no device could ever be perfected to cleanse sulfur dioxide from smokestack gases. Although the deadlines keep changing, the present pollution control law will require lower levels in smokestack gases.
Western coal - environmental problems
The coal companies already have moved almost half their production to the Western Plains states, out of the reach of most. United Mine Workers union organizers. Western coal is closer to the surface, so it costs less to mine. And it is "cleaner." But there are environmental problems there too, mainly the reclamation of stripped land. When the strip mining bill was before Congress, conservationists - including the Senate Democratic leader, Mike Mansfield of Montana - took the position that the economic benefits were not worth the irreparable damage to the land. The federal government has always retained mineral rights under land that was turned over to homesteaders. These are the rich coal beds, stretching from Montana to New Mexico, that the coal companies would like to lease.
Muskie and Train key figures
Besides the federal requirements for restoring stripped land in the West, stopping the western movement seems to depend on (I) effective use of scrubbers; or (2) revision of the sulfur dioxide restrictions. There are two people standing squarely in the way of any official relaxation of the clean air rules. One is Sen. Edmund Muskie (D., Maine), chairman of the Senate subcommittee on environmental pollution.
The other is Russell Train, administrator of EPA. Muskie is chairman of the new Budget Committee and must give up one of his other chairmanships. If it is the environmental committee and if Train should be fired by the President (a thought that appeals to many Republican contributors), the political conditions would change.
Whatever the issue, the coal states present less than a united front. Illinois and Appalachia are worried about western coal. The Westerners cannot agree whether environmental degradation is an acceptable price for economic growth. Just as important, the interests and concerns of operators and miners tend to be different.
Of considerable practical significance in the scramble for federal grants is the advancement of a congressman from Illinois, Rep. Sidney R. Yates (D., Chicago), to the chairmanship of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that has jurisdiction over the funding of coal gasification projects.
Illinois Issues/February 1975/63