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Mike Norman (Norman): Well, the United States has often been called “the Saudi Arabia of coal.” Hello everybody; this is Mike Norman. And we will be talking about coal today with my guest, Barry Schneer, who is an attorney and also a consultant for the energy industry. Barry, thank you very much for coming on the program; I appreciate it.

So what about that? They often say, “The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal.” We have a huge amount of coal. Is coal now becoming a major new source of energy for electricity generation? Will we be tapping into that?

Barry Schneer, consultant/attorney, energy industry (Schneer): I think coal’s always been a source of energy in this country. It has for the past hundred years been a source of that. There’s been a lot of controversy today about clean coal, about carbon emissions. But as it stands right now, the United States under its current rate of consumption has over 200 years’ worth of energy reserves. Within the form of coal, we have more coal than the Middle East does in oil based in energy units. That’s there. So coal is a significant source of energy for our country.

Norman: But you talked a little bit about it, and I think this was at least the way it’s viewed as an environmental problem. Coal as … greenhouse gas emissions. There’s a movement against the use of this sort of energy. Do we have to give up environmental safety to have energy? Is that the question that we face?

Schneer: The answer to that question I think is no. You don’t have to go ahead and compromise the use of coal as a form to generate electricity and then sacrifice that against the environment. That’s not something that we really need to do. And with current technologies that exist on the market today, you’re beginning to see more and more of what we call “clean coal technologies.”

And when I say “clean coal technologies,” what I’m talking about is a host of technologies that are designed to lower the carbon footprint of coal-generating power plants.

Norman: So it’s not that the coal itself is different. It’s the way we process it. It’s the way we burn it. It’s the technologies we use when we consume the coal. When they refer to "clean," that’s what they’re talking about, right?

Schneer: That’s correct. It’s being able to reduce those types of emissions that we find toxic—dioxins, furans; those are these nasty little things that will fly up and go out of the stack of the power plants, be breathed in by local and residential commercial communities, and that then cause other types of toxic effects.

According to the Energy Information Administration, the United States has invested over $90 billion in clean coal technologies in the past two decades. So it goes to show that this country really is making a significant investment along these areas, more so …