Coal | featured news

It's become something of a clich in energy-policy discussions: The United States is making headway on global warming and slashing its carbon-dioxide emissions all because of a glut of cheap natural gas that's elbowing out dirty coal power.

Tony Clift's family has plowed the rich black soil of Australia's Liverpool Plains for six generations. The thought of selling never crossed his mind — until a Chinese company came to town. Shenhua Watermark Coal offered to buy farms at unheard-of prices. The decision wasn't easy, Clift says. His pioneer ancestors settled the land in 1832. But farming is a business nowadays, and selling his 6,500 acres (2,600 hectares) made business sense.

Mining company Freeport-McMoRan is buying a pair of oil and gas producers for $9 billion, creating a natural resources conglomerate with assets ranging from oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico to a huge copper mine in Indonesia....

Carbon dioxide emissions hit an unexpected 20-year low earlier this year, mainly because utilities have switched from coal to natural gas.

King Coal is meeting its match: natural gas. Power plants fired by natural gas have set a new record by producing as much electricity in the United States as those run by coal, long the nation's dominant power producer.

Coal may be dying in the United States, but it’s still the world’s preferred fuel for generating electricity — especially in China and India. And that’s why many energy experts think it’s so crucial to figure out how to capture carbon from all those coal plants and stash it deep underground.