Big Brown Closes

Big Brown in Fairfield Texas, a coal fired power plant that used Wyoming coal, has closed, the victim of natural gas.

We've been tracking this trend for some time.  It's this trend, the phasing out of coal for electrical power generation, that's causing the decline in demand for Wyoming coal. And this trend will continue.

It's worth noting, a day after Natrona County's Chuck Gray introduced a quixotic bill to sue Washington State over it's "no" to a coal terminal in its state, thereby proposing to bypass the Attorney General who no doubt know that such an effort is doomed to failure, that this is not only a national trend, but set to become a global one.  Indeed, it hit in Europe in some ways before here, and its in full swing here.  People who look to Asian markets to save coal are fooling themselves.  Sure, they might consume it at an increased rate briefly, but at the speed this conversion is occurring, it will be brief indeed.

As we have also noted, this is a trend line that is over a century old.  We always only live in our own times and therefore have a hard time appreciating that. But if we really want to sue somebody. . .sue the Royal Navy.  They really accelerated this change.

 

Me, third from right, when I thought I had a career in geology, and probably in coal.