Things that could have been: A pipeline to transport coal from Southwest Virginia to Portsmouth

History is simply a collection of decisions we’ve made over the years. We know the roads we took to get here. Oftentimes, though, it’s easy to forget the roads we didn’t take. This is the fourth of a five-part series that looks at projects proposed in Virginia from the 1940s into the 1990s that were never built but which would have changed things if they had been. Today: The 1980s.

From 1983 to 1985, a battle extraordinaire played out in Virginia that pitted some of the state’s most powerful business interests against another: the railroads against the utilities and coal companies, with environmentalists and the agriculture community teaming up with the railroads. Yes, that was an odd pairing all around.

A consortium of two utilities (one of them Virginia Electric Power) and two coal companies had proposed building a pipeline from Southwest Virginia to Hampton Roads to transport liquefied coal. The possible starting points were many — Grundy in Buchanan County and the Big Stone Gap and Pound in Wise County were most frequently mentioned — but the end point was always Portsmouth. The idea was to pulverize the coal, mix it with water and ship it to the port, where the water would be removed via centrifuges, leaving just coal. The cost of the pipeline was estimated at $600 million to $1 billion. In today’s money, that’s $1.9 billion to $3.28 billion, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator. 

The proponents said the pipeline would allow them to avoid high rail shipping rates and lower costs for electric consumers, at a time when utilities still primarily burned coal for power. The railroads worried about losing business, environmentalists warned about pollution and all the water that would have to be guzzled up to make this pipeline work, and farmers didn’t like the idea of losing farmland to eminent domain.

All this went before the General Assembly, which had to approve the creation of a public service authority to carry out the project. It didn’t. The key vote was a 5-5 tie in the Senate Finance Committee that effectively killed the plan. 

This proposal came at a time when coal was still king. Coal production was rising after the energy crises of the 1970s. In 1984, U.S. coal production was up 46.8% over a decade’s time. Nationally, it accounted for 62.4% of the nation’s electricity production. Population in coal counties was increasing because business was booming. 

Today we live in a very different world. Coal production last year was down to the levels of 1969, primarily because coal is no longer our main power source. It’s fallen all the way to fourth place, accounting for just 16.1% of the nation’s power, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Natural gas is first at 43.1%, with renewables now in second place at 21.3%, surpassing nuclear. As coal’s role has shrunk, so has the population of the counties that produce it. Nationally, coal production is less than half of what it was at its peak in 2008.

What would have happened if the General Assembly had approved that pipeline? Hypotheticals are always unknowable, but a single pipeline would not have reversed the global trends that have pushed coal use downward. Instead, we might have a half-used pipeline stretching across the state. Would the pipeline have really lowered utility rates? We have no way of knowing; we just know that utility rates remain an issue today. The real lesson here, though, may not be about energy but about technology: Things change. In the 1980s, coal slurries were considered innovative technology. Now they’re not. What technological solutions being proposed today are ones that will, a few decades from now, be completely outdated?

Coming Friday: The proposed state college that was never built.