lignite

Teachers from across the region are in Bismarck – learning about lignite.

The annual Lignite Education seminar is being held at Bismarck State College, sponsored by the Lignite Energy Council.

"Normally when we think about lignite, it's 80 percent used for generating electricity, and 20 percent at the Great Plains Synfuels Plant, making synthetic natural gas and a plethora of fertilizers," said Council vice-president Steve Van Dyke.

This year, the focus of the seminar is toward new and emerging markets.

There’s a lot of interest in what are called “rare earth elements.”

They have been found in North Dakota’s lignite deposits.

"They're 14 different elements," said North Dakota state geologist Ed Murphy. "They make very strong, and relatively small, magnets."

Murphy said they're used in things such as cell phones, solar technology and wind turbines.

"Every time we go out, we find a little bit higher levels of those rare earth elements," Murphy said. "We have found the highest concentration of those elements in coal in the nation."

“Unlocking 800 years of Energy.”

That was the theme for the annual Lignite Energy Council meeting, held in Bismarck.

Council vice-president Steve Van Dyke said he can sense optimism among the state’s coal industry, as well as its partners that use lignite for electric power generation.

Officials across coal-rich states are cheering an announcement that the Environmental Protection Agency will withdraw the Clean Power Plan. Now, attention turns to how the nation will address greenhouse gas emissions going forward.

The rule put in place by the Obama administration would have required North Dakota to reduce its carbon emissions 45 percent by 2030. The state’s coal industry worried this would force utilities to shut down some coal-fired power plants and, subsequently, the coal mines that feed lignite to these facilities.

North Dakota’s lignite coal industry has ambitious -- and pricey -- plans to capture carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, which industry leaders highlighted Thursday at a conference in Bismarck.

If the coal industry is to survive, its savior may be something often touted by President Donald Trump when he talks energy.

“We’re going to have clean coal, really clean coal,” he said earlier this year in announcing an executive order to roll back the emission-targeting Clean Power Plan.

The Lignite Energy Council is holding its annual Teachers’ Seminar at Bismarck State College.

It’s been holding this summer event for the past 32 years.

"The idea is, people who are teaching will include information about the lignite industry when they're teaching about math. science, the history of North Dakota," said the Council's Steve Van Dyke. "The lignite industry is the 5th largest industry in the state, and it plays a votal role."

Van Dyke was the first speaker at the seminar. He totled his talk, "Lignite -- North Dakota's Best kept Secret."

When you think of scorpions, you may think of those poisonous desert-dwelling creatures from the southwestern part of the US.

Chances are, scorpions don’t come to mind when you think of North Dakota.

But they’re here – in areas with lignite coal.

"They live primarily in the cracks of coal," said State Geologist Ed Murphy. "We found out very early, working on coal in the 1980s, it wasn't unusual to have a scorpion hanging upside down on the bottom of the chunk of coal."

Steven Somsen’s farm has looked the same his entire life -- it’s flat, with wheat and soybeans that will soon grow as far as the eye can see.

But the 61-year-old’s view changed last year.

“Those are the closest ones to us, but they’re not our towers,” he said, pointing to several nearby wind turbines. “That’s the neighbors’. Ours are way, way off in there.”

One hundred wind turbines dot the farmland around his rural community of Courtenay in eastern North Dakota. Somsen has three on his land.