Robert Johnson, PE, stands in front of the so-called 'Glob Pile' in Germantown, Illinois. (Martin/TYG)

In the dozen years since, toxic chemicals have seeped into the aquifer that supplies the town’s water. “A lot of people got sick, really sick, with cancer and all sorts of weird illnesses, from drinking the water,” said Robert L. Johnson, PE, a licensed Professional Engineer and an environmental consultant who has done legal work on Germantown’s behalf. “But there’s nothing I can do about the illnesses, so I focus on the regulations.” Johnson has fought the company and the state to get the pile removed, but so far he has had no success.

Stories like Germantown’s come out of history books, so it may surprise Americans to hear them today. Coal itself seems to be a relic of the past, a staple and symbol of the industrial age, before environmental concern began to play a role in energy decisions. But coal is no less important to our national economy than it once was. Nor is it any less important to thousands of miners and their communities throughout the country, although they are fewer in number today.

Illinois is a minor and long-ignored player among coal states. It has never been the largest coal producer in the country, and when the center of American coal production shifted from the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia to the sprawling plateaus of Wyoming 20 years ago, Illinois was skipped over. Regulations on sulfur emissions have left the sulfur-rich coal of the Illinois Basin with few customers, and today the state’s coal industry is an echo of what it once was.

Tens of thousands of former miners are out of work in central and southern Illinois. Countless towns once supported by coal are economically depressed. Looking for solutions, the state and its coal industry have begun thinking creatively, pressing for cleaner and more efficient coal technology in hopes of restoring its coal past.

Nevertheless, despite controversy on all sides of the battle over coal’s future, the rock itself will decide.

An Industry of the Past

The Illinois Coal Association was founded in 1878 as the trade organization for the coal companies operating in the state. Phil Gonet, the association’s president, has a poster with dozens of faces of the 1906 board in his Springfield office. Gonet is one of only three people listed on the association’s website today.

He came to Illinois after graduate school to work at a local utility; now he is responsible for promoting the state’s coal industry and explaining its importance to outsiders.

“A lot of people came to this state in the early 1900s to mine,” he said. “A lot of them, in central and southern Illinois, came here from Europe to mine coal. It was the lifeblood of southern Illinois for a long time.”

Those days are gone. After the state’s production peak in 1918, decades of declining demand followed, thanks to the slowed westward expansion of the country and the emergence of new energy sources. But most of the damage has come in recent years. The 1990 extension of the Clean Air Act limited sulfur emissions from power generation, leaving even fewer customers for sulfur-rich Illinois coal. The industry Gonet represents has been in decline ever since.

But some companies have not done poorly. The Illinois Coal Association has a dozen member companies, many with operations in other states. Peabody Energy, one of the members, is the largest coal mining company in the world. Hardly known outside of the industry, Peabody’s global coal reserves contain more potential energy than ExxonMobil’s entire petroleum store. The company’s Illinois operation is a fraction of its facilities in Wyoming, where it operates vast strip mines, but it remains a dominant player in the Midwest. Peabody is building the largest power plant under construction in the country, the Prairie State Energy Campus, in the small downstate town of Marissa.

Prairie State has been helped along by grants and tax incentives from the state. The money will come out of a fund established by the Coal Act of 2000. The state bill provided incentives to power companies to build plants next to mines, eliminating transportation costs and keeping plants in-state. The employment potential and tax revenue Prairie State promises are expected to be a windfall for Illinois, but the project comes with a three-billion-dollar price tag. The fund was established to make this type of venture possible.

The project has Gonet excited. He showed off Peabody’s official literature: “Represents the next generation of clean coal… Power for 1.7 million families … 500 permanent jobs, 2,500 constructions jobs … To use six million tons of Illinois coal.” In the town of about 2,000 people, with recent unemployment around ten percent, 500 new jobs would revitalize the local economy.

But despite Peabody’s claims, Prairie State will be far from clean. It will use pulverized coal, a technology dating to the 1920s that has since been superseded by technological improvements making coal power cleaner. Illinois coal, however, is unsuitable for many other furnace types because of its high sulfur content. In pulverized coal plants, 80 percent of the ash escapes in exhaust gas, taking with it toxins and carbon from the rock. Despite minor upgrades over the years, pulverized coal is dirty, differing little from the coal-fired power plants of decades ago.

But for now, Prairie State is the best option Illinois has.