James P. Rogers
Management
No, I mean, we try and be judicious. We -- one of the main drivers was the whole regulatory environment, not only what we're facing with Boiler MACT and something called BART, but just trying to look down the road a few years as to where do we think this country is going. In the past, we've always looked at it, and coal was always so advantaged that you just swallowed hard and paid all the regulatory changes you had to make, paid for all those changes. Now with the outlook for natural gas and as compared to Central Appalachian coal, it's really a push on the economics. So then you go to the capital cost, and Curt gave it to you, $90 million compared to something that was probably a couple of hundred million north of that for getting coal in compliance. So you knew you were going to do something. Then the issue is how much do you do. This amount allows us to avoid that capital, meets all our regulatory requirements and then some. Plus, frankly, we tend to like the idea of being -- for our energy needs here at our major site, half gas, half coal. We think that kind of plays to what we talk about so many other places, in terms of being diversified and trying to smooth out earnings. So net-net, a good result. It's a shame, in a way, we had to eat, I think, $17 million, but we couldn't just sit on our hands earlier. We had to get going on the engineering to be in compliance to meet the timeline. And then, of course, the world for shale gas just moved, gas prices moved, and we got a much better alternative so we had to scrap the plans to change our boilers over.