WHY PIPELINES WILL MAKE IT

Coal is not a unique target of government meddling and anticapitalist crusading, so that to explain its decline (slow, and sometimes interrupted by short booms, but nevertheless unmistakable), one must look for disadvantages that more advanced fuels do not have.

There are three: comparatively low energy concentration; cumbersome transportation; and labor-intensity.

The energy concentration of coal (BTU's per weight or per volume) displaced, in its day, wood as an industrial fuel; but the concentration is lower than that of oil, and far lower than that of uranium. The other two properties are not altogether independent, but are to some extent a consequence of the energy concentration: for example, a truck will haul about as many tons of coal as of uranium ore; but the energy of the latter is some 15 times greater (some 1500 times greater if the uranium ends up in a breeder), so that the energy is some 15 or 1500 times easier to transport. A similar comparison holds for the energy mined per miner per shift, i.e., for the labor intensity.

There is nothing pipelines can do about the energy concentration of the fuel they carry, but they can drastically improve transportation and lower the labor intensity. Part of the difficulty of transporting coal is, of course, the labor intensity of the transport: utilities and other coal users end up without coal no matter whether the railroad workers or the miners are on strike. But apart from labor strife, there is the important consideration that once the investment is made in a heavily automated operation, it is (except for energy and other operating expenses) inflation-proof: steel pipes do not ask for cost-of-living increases.

Pipelines can therefore be artificially delayed by government restrictions and environmentalist sabotage, just as nuclear power can be artificially delayed; but it is the railroads themselves which eventually overcame artificial delays in the last century, demonstrating that the force of sheer merit ultimately triumphs.