Interesting stuff just released by a group at MIT on the outlook for coal in the US. Their main page is here and the executive summary is here.

They start with two realistic premises and take it from there:

Our first premise is that the risks of global warming are real and that the United States and other governments should and will take action to restrict the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Our second and equally important premise is that coal will continue to play a large and indispensable role in a greenhouse gas constrained world.

They also give a rather sobering factoid right off the bat:

If 60% of the CO2 produced from U.S. coal-based power generation were to be captured and compressed to a liquid for geologic sequestration, its volume would about equal the total U.S. oil consumption of 20 million barrels per day.

Perhaps because it is about as interdisciplinary as can be, with participants from political science to chemical engineering to economics, the report is refreshingly policy-prescriptive, urging specific government actions in dozens of ways, and even goes so far as

A more aggressive U.S. policy appears to be in line with public attitudes. Americans now rank global warming as the number one environmental problem facing the country, and seventy percent of the American public think that the U.S. government needs to do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Willingness to pay to solve this problem has grown 50 percent over the past three years.

and is as politics/policy/current events aware as noting that

There is the possibility of a perverse incentive for increased early investment in coalfired power plants without capture, whether SCPC or IGCC, in the expectation that the emissions from these plants would potentially be “grandfathered” by the grant of free CO2 allowances as part of future carbon emissions regulations and that (in unregulated markets) they would also benefi t from the increase in electricity prices that will accompany a carbon control regime. Congress should act to close this “grandfathering” loophole before it becomes a problem.

We should note that the grandfathering loophole isn’t a problem right now because it doesn’t exist. It will only exist once cap-and-trade or carbon tax legislation is passed and only if a grandfather clause it written in. But their point is made: some coal plant builders think there is a good chance they will be grandfathered, although Senators Boxer and Bingaman have been telling them to fuhhggetaboutit. But it’s a minor point and the report is good reading.