This isn’t another tired story about how kicking the coal habit will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That would be like kicking a dead horse. Instead, there is a massive new benefit to ditching the dirty: Doing so will free up billions of gallons of water. If all coal-fired power plants in the U.S. were converted to natural gas, the annual water savings could reach 12,250 billion gallons, or 260 percent of current annual U.S. industrial water use, according to a new study from Duke University. Arguably, ditching coal could make up for all the water that fracking is sucking down in the shale patch, so it could take the pressure off that controversial method of extracting oil. At the same time, coal can largely blame its own demise on this hydraulic fracking boom that has led to abundant natural gas supplies. Natural gas has surpassed coal as the top […]