Lighting Up with Coal

The world's largest seller of coal, Peabody Coal Co. of St. Louis, last week signed one of the biggest single contracts in the history of the industry.

The $500 million agreement calls for the delivery by Peabody of a minimum of 117 million tons of coal to the yet-to-be-built Mohave Power Project in Clark County, Nev., 80 miles from Las Vegas. Being built by three Southwestern utility companies headed by Southern California Edison, the $188 million electrical-power plant will have two 750,000-kw. generators on 2,500 acres of Colorado River land. Power from the plant, along with that from a similar project already under construction in western New Mexico, will light up the lamps of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and the proliferating lower two-thirds of California.

The Mohave furnaces will gobble up the equivalent of two 100-car trains of coal each day when they begin operating in 1970. Peabody will mine the coal in the Black Mesa area of northern Arizona, crush and convert it to slurry by adding water, pump it to the Mohave plant by way of a 275-mile coal pipeline (the longest of its kind in the world).

The Nevada site for the Mohave project was selected because 1) there are no antismog regulations out on the desert, 2) the Colorado River is an ideal source of the water required by the plant, and 3) the desert land is central to the areas it will serve. selection of coal, rather than gas-oil or nuclear energy to fuel the Mohave power plant, was determined by the simple economics of electric-power production. Coal-generated power costs about 60% as much as that produced by a new nuclear plant, and at least 10% less than gas-oil generation. Moreover, new, extra-high voltage power lines, such as the ones that will carry current 200 miles from Mohave to San Clemente, Calif., have made long-distance power transmission economically feasible. The choice of coal will also result in addi tional jobs and some $30 million in royalties to the Hopi and Navajo owners of the Black Mesa coal mines.

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