TXU recently announced its planned purchase by a group of private investors for $45 billion. The potential new owners say they would at least temporally suspend plans to build  eight coal plants in the state and would upgrade air pollution controls on those they do build.

Your cooperative believes growing energy demand will require a diversity of energy sources and unceasing commitment to energy management and conservation in the future. Coal will be part of the mix because coal gives us  the best opportunity to hold down rates. The United States has an estimated 250-year supply of coal.

Nationwide, co-ops are doing a better job than the rest of the industry in keeping up with the latest, cleanest, coal-burning technologies. It's the companies that persist in using their oldest, dirtiest plants that give electric utilities a bad name.

Unfortunately, there's no way to get around the fact that the best technology costs more to implement-50-percent more according to some estimates. So making the process cleaner initially costs more.

Right now, the cleanest coal power plants use fluidized bed coal gasification in which the coal or lignite is turned into a gas that is used to power turbines.

This is as I have said, expensive and will increase the cost of electricity. Plants "scrub" the mercury, nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide. Then they can separate the remaining by products: carbon dioxide (CO₂), carbon monoxide and hydrogen,  Sometime in the future, the hydrogen could be used to power everything from cars to other power plants.

Keeping CO₂ , out of the air is called "carbon sequestration". The compound is believed to contribute to global warming. You will hear talk about a plant's or building 's "carbon footprint" and how it can be reduced. Alternatives for sequestering carbon dioxide include pumping it into existing played-out oil and gas wells or planting new crops dedicated to absorbing the gas. Certain trees are specially efficient at doing so. But sequestration technology is in its early days.

The federal government and the utility industry are funding research for a near-zero-emission coal plant called FutureGen. Texas may be chosen as the host state for the $1 billion experimental model, which would use carbon sequestration. 

As a Congress  and the public become more insistent that the emissions be reduced, the federal government must set up to the plate to fund much more research into reducing pollutants from conventional power sources such as coal.

At the same time, new funding for research into renewables is another high priority. And the cost of cleaner air must be carried, to some extend, by the customers who use the power. 

Take a look at the map at the left, which shows where coal assets are based in United States. Coal simply can't be counted out of our future.