Funny how we were just talking with a friend who used to run electricity trading for a plant conglomerate. His words were "he sounds like the phone executives in the early 90s talking about land line phones".
Heh, when all the (coal) dust settles. That was clever, even though the guy probably didn't mean it that way. My query is, what dust-up is he talking about? Does he mean "in 20 years when renewables are providing a majority"? A link to his interview would help to get the context of that comment he made.
Coal is going to be used, somewhere. Now we are just bitching about how expensive the government decides to make it.
It will be used for making steel, but of course only certain grades of anthracite are suitable for that and by definition if you're talking power stations you're talking thermal coal. Which are two commodities so different that they really share only a name in common. Since the vast majority of people, including our dear leader, don't even understand that fundamental basic of coal markets, they're really in no position to have a single relevant opinion on coal. And just to be clear, the expense of coal and any other polluting resource has always existed. Everyone who's impacted by acid rain or respiratory disease or polluted air or water is exposed to that expense. It's just that the coal and electric utilities have gotten away with getting all the benefits and not paying much of the expense of their product up to now. So when the government insists that a coal company take action to prevent my 5 year old from suffering from respiratory distress or my 1000 acres of lumber producing forest from being killed by acid rain, that's not the government deciding to make coal more expensive. It's the government making the producers and users of coal pay for it's full cost. Huge difference.
If they ever had to pay the true environmental cost they would have never even started burning it in the first place.
I know OP was talking about domestic energy production but I know we're exporting a lot of coal. I live near a major east-west CSX line and see full coal trains heading east to Baltimore pretty frequently. To address OP's natural gas pipeline question: While it sounds good on paper, putting in a natural gas pipeline to a power plant would be very expensive. The plants I've seen in West Virginia are in the boonies. They can bring coal in by rail and truck but running a gas line big enough to supply a power plant would be nuts.
Back to my last post, the majority of coal exported is metallurgical coal (https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/), which is used to make steel, not electricity. When you consider that metallurgical coal is worth at least twice as much as thermal coal, it's an even high proportion by revenue. You just can't say the word "coal" as if it's all the same black stuff, it leads to all kinds of backwards thinking on the subject if you don't grasp the difference. For example, the widespread coal mining company bankruptcies were primarily due to a collapse in the price of metallurgical coal due to decrease steel demand as the worldwide economy collapsed in the great recession, not Obama environmental regulations as I've heard falsely claimed again and again. And actually the WV coal power plants are in the boonies because that's where the coal is, not because it's a great place for them. Back in the day you generally co-sited a thermal coal mine with a coal power plant and a 50+ year contract or co-ownership of the two, and the coal is delivered the short distance between the two often by either being slurried and moved via pipeline or by conveyor belt. Plus there are fewer people to complain about the pollution and more of them are dependent of the revenue the combined system brings their economy. On the flip side you can put a gas plant a lot closer to civilization than a coal plant and you won't get the impact or public blowback. You end up with reduced transmission building and O&M costs and a more reliable grid, and the gas infrastructure is already there.
According to that interview (Murray), which the link is no longer active for... natural gas costs 4X as much per KWH of power generation. Renewable's over 20 times as much.
Last I heard, coal was about 30% of our electricity, and even Murray agrees that number will shrink. Algae is the one that gets them. Renewable but doesn't change anything they want changed. They have algae oil down to about $10 per gallon. And then there are the small localized nuke plants which even eat their own waste. It's a brave new world out there and coal is dying a natural death. No need to kill it, and as it is we still need it, or somebody in the world needs it.