The United States isn't going to get "beyond petroleum" anytime soon, but the chief executive of oil giant BP says it's time for the nation to start thinking beyond coal.
The nation should not be trying to save coal jobs at the expense of cleaner fuel industries, Tony Hayward, head of BP PLC, told a Washington think tank audience yesterday, adding that there is no reason to keep building coal-burning power plants here.
"We've got to find a better way to create jobs than preserving coal jobs," Hayward told his audience at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Hayward's comments reflect an increasingly bitter political rift between two of the largest elements of the country's energy industry - coal and natural gas.
Gas executives are irritated that authors of the House climate bill last year built significant protections into the legislation to protect coal industry jobs and coal-state lawmakers. If lawmakers want to cut carbon emissions, they say, they should look more to natural gas, which emits about half as much carbon as coal. They say gas should be the "bridge fuel" to a low-carbon future or, even better, a permanent fixture of a diverse approach to lowering emissions.
"The coal sector was disproportionately favored in the first go at this," Hayward said. "It's about creating jobs."
BP is one of the world's largest producers and refiners of oil and gas. But it has little or no stake in coal, a fact that the coal industry highlights in challenging Hayward's assertions.
