ON A SPRING DAY IN 2012, A UNION PACIFIC TRAIN GROUND TO A STOP OUTSIDE A SPRAWLING construction site in Fulton, a blink-and-miss-it town in southwestern Arkansas. Piled high in the train’s 135 cars was the first batch of black coal from Wyoming, about 16,000 of the 2 million tons needed annually to feed the brand-new John W. Turk, Jr. Power Plant, set to go online within a few months. When officials from the Southwestern Electric Power Co. (SWEPCO) finally flipped the switch on this 600-megawatt, $1.8 billion structure, it was unusual enough: That year, only four other coal-fired plants in the United States opened their doors. But the Turk plant represented something more, a genuine first of its kind in the country: an ultra-supercritical coal burner fitted with cutting-edge…
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Foreign Policy (Digital) - 1 Issue, January - February 2015