Bloomberg: Coal Greens Love Buoyed By Shale Gas Hydraulic Fracking

The world’s most abundant fossil fuel could be tapped without moving mountains, delivered without trucks or trains and burned without greenhouse-gas emissions.

The technology to make this possible has been around for decades. Underground coal gasification was pioneered by Sir William Siemens in the 1860s to light London’s streets. Vladimir Lenin hailed the method in a 1913 article in Pravda for its potential to rescue Russians from hazards of underground mines.

Despite its early boosters, the technology never caught on in the U.S., mostly for cost reasons. Now the improvements in seismic mapping and drilling that lit a fire under the U.S. fracking boom may also spur development of a domestic coal gas industry, proponents said.

“The shale gas revolution is opening doors for the coal gas revolution,” said Richard Morse, director of coal and carbon research at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “We knew it was there but couldn’t get it out in a cost- effective way.” MORE