BP Betrayal, Part 2: First Tar Sands, Now Drilling for Coal!

Oil giant BP is indeed going Beyond Petroleum once again. Less than two weeks ago came the news that BP was jumping into tar sands. Now comes the news that they've made a deal in Wyoming to drill for coal!
Here's the nub of the deal just struck with GasTech:
A Casper-based company announced a partnership with British Petroleum to test whether the geological and economic conditions exist to step beyond conventional mining and use a recovery method that relies on drill bits instead of shovels. The companies plan to develop underground, or in-situ, coal gasification technology in the Powder River Basin.
The reason behind this move is that only about 10% of enormous coal deposits there are accessible to surface mining. You just can't get to deposits lying between 500 and 2300 feet underground. GasTech and BP plan to go after all that unminable coal together -- but none of it will ever reach the surface in solid form. They plan to gassify it underground.
Much like in-situ uranium mining, underground coal gasification is largely a matter of manipulating and monitoring the underground water reservoir. Morzenti said the oxygen stimulation occurs under the water table in the coal, so there's little chance of igniting an underground coal seam fire.
Little chance? How little, exactly? It would be nice to know. Because an underground coal fire would have a lot to feed off. GasTech holds leases to about 13 billion tons of state-owned coal spanning 125 sections in the basin. Each section encompasses about 100 million tons of coal.
We've reported on underground coal fires before. Ask the folks in Centralia, Pa about the one that's been burning there since 1962.
What will BP think of next to go beyond petroleum?














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