Category Archives: Coal mining

Legislative resistance to mountaintop removal in the US

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On his blog, Al Gore wrote recently about legislation being advanced by US Senators Lamar Alexander and Ben Cardin to reclassify mining waste as a pollutant, and making it illegal to dump the waste from mountaintop removal mining in the valleys nearby. Just by requiring companies to cart off these wastes and dispose of them in a more responsible way, the senators expect that the legislation would make mountaintop removal mining no longer commercially viable.

If so, this reveals just how illusory the economic benefits from the practice are. It only makes sense when you ignore all of the harmful secondary effects and focus exclusively on the revenue arising from the coal. If operators of mountaintop removal mines had to pay for the damage they are causing to air, water, habitat, and climate, the industry would almost certainly cease to exist.

The situation is akin to the scene in The Simpsons where Homer cooks a large amount of bacon so that he can sell the grease. To him, the revenue from selling the grease seems like a profit, because he ignores the cost of buying the bacon. The situation with the negative effects of mountaintop removal mining is a bit more insidious, however, since the revenues from selling the coal go to one group of people, while the damage arising from the mining largely harms others. It is like when thieves steal copper wiring from buildings: they get a small amount of cash, but it costs the building owner much more to repair the damage that was done.

The US Environmental Protection Agency is also planning regulatory changes that will restrict this destructive practice.

Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining: An American Tragedy

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Mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining is one of America’s worst environmental crimes. Every day, across Appalachia, the coal industry literally blows the tops off the mountains: clear-cutting forests, wiping out natural habitats and poisoning rivers and drinking water. Not only are these mountains lost forever, but the heritage and the health of families across the region are being sacrificed. For a mere 7 percent of the nation’s coal, the tradeoff does not add up.

Rainforest Action Network is partnering with a community-based movement from Appalachia to compel the Environmental Protection Agency and other key agencies to ban the practice.

Impacts to Mountains and Forests

MTR is a mining practice where explosives are used to remove the tops of mountains and expose the small seams of coal that lie beneath. It is estimated the explosive equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb is detonated every week in Appalachia. Once blasted, the earth from the mountaintop is then dumped in the neighboring valleys.

Before mining can begin, tracts of deciduous forests are clearcut (often burned or sometimes illegally dumped into valley fills). These unique hardwood forests are some of the most biologically diverse in North America.

Impacts to Drinking Water and Human Health

MTR mining poses significant threats to water quality in Appalachia, despite the objectives and requirements of the Clean Water Act designed to protect our nation’s precious water supplies. According to a 2005 environmental impact statement, nearly 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams have been buried or contaminated.

After blasting has occurred, waste from mining operations is systematically dumped into nearby valleys, burying streams. This waste then releases toxic metals, killing life in streams and polluting ground water. Health problems such as cancer, liver and kidney disease, and skin rashes have been found in correlation with people who drink water from wells contaminated by coal mining. This problem was exacerbated in 2002 when the Bush Administration changed rules in the Clean Water Act, allowing waste material to be considered “fill”, effectively legalizing the dumping of toxic mining waste directly into Appalachian waterways.

Once coal is extracted, it is then washed and treated, resulting in waste water called coal sludge, a mix of water, coal dust, clay and toxic chemicals such as arsenic, mercury, lead, copper, selenium and chromium. Billions of gallons are then stored in vast, unlined impoundments or injected for storage in abandoned underground-mines.

Impoundments are often held in place by mining debris or earthen dams, making them unstable. Sludge dams have been known to fail. In October 2000, residents of Martin County, Kentucky suffered 306 million gallons of slurry entering their water supply. The disastrous spill was over 30 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill.

Mitigation and Regulation Efforts

A recent peer-reviewed report in the journal Science concluded that mountaintop mining has serious environmental impacts that mitigation practices cannot successfully address.

While robust reclamation efforts are required for mountaintop removal sites, in practice, most sites receive little more than a spraying of exotic grass seed. Attempts to reclaim the land after MTR coal-mining operations generally result in abandoned, unmanaged and unproductive scrublands. Clear cutting and topsoil loss disrupts the absorption of rainfall, which has resulted in severe flash floods.

Impacts on Jobs and Clean Energy Opportunities

Coal companies use MTR mining methods because it allows for almost complete recovery of coal seams while significantly reducing the number of workers required compared to conventional methods. The coal-bearing counties of Appalachia are some of the poorest in the nation, despite the fact that some of the greatest wealth is being extracted from them.

The future of coal and indeed of our total energy picture lies in change and innovation. We must embrace a clean energy future for our economic survival as well as our environmental and public health. Diversification of the Appalachian economy is now more important than ever.

Appalachia has a wealth of clean energy resources that can be developed to provide new jobs and tax revenues, including wind, solar, low-impact hydro, and sustainable biomass. This development can especially support rural areas, those hardest hit by the declining economy. With political and financial leadership we could transition Appalachia from coal country to clean energy country.

The Way Forward

Polls demonstrate that most Americans oppose MTR removal coal mining.

RAN is demanding a moratorium on all new MTR permits, reversal of the Bush Administration rules changes to the stream buffer zone and fill rules, and strict enforcement of the Clean Water Act for existing MTR operations.

Boucher on EPA regulation

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Quote of the day, from Rick Boucher, Democratic Congressman from West Virginia:

“[Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)] regulation of greenhouse gases would be the worst outcome for the coal industry and coal-related jobs. Our bill [to block EPA regulation for two years] is a responsible, achievable approach which prevents the EPA from enacting regulations that would harm coal and gives Congress time to establish a balanced program.”

We are definitely facing an uphill battle here. Back in 2009, Boucher voted in favour of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, which sought to create a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases.

Australia’s coal deal with China

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Given their level of water scarcity, Australia may be the developed nation most exposed to climate change risks. Unfortunately, that has not translated into political action. Now, Australia is cementing its role as a carbon-intensive state, with a $60 billion deal to provide China Power International Development with 30 million tonnes of coal annually for the next two decades.

This is exactly the wrong thing to do for so many reasons. It locks two important states into the usage of yesterday’s energy source, in defiance of the risks that both face due to climate change. Rather than supporting China’s destructive coal habit, advanced economies like that of Australia ought to be helping them to develop and deploy low- and zero-carbon forms of energy. Unless rapidly developing states like India and China can put themselves onto a low-carbon development path, our chances of avoiding dangerous or catastrophic climate change are slim indeed.

Also, if developed countries continue to supply the world’s dirtiest fuels to states like China, they cannot continue to use Chinese inaction as an excuse to do nothing at home. China, Australia, and everyone else need to move beyond fossil fuels. This deal does the opposite.

US 2011 budget may cut coal subsidies

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Analysis from the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) shows that federal subsidies for coal in the United States will be reduced significantly between 2011 and 2020, provided the budget can be passed through Congress.

Four coal tax preferences are being reduced: Expensing of Exploration and Development Costs, Percent Depletion for Hard Mineral Fossil Fuels, Royalty Taxation, and Domestic Manufacturing Deduction for Hard Mineral Fossil Fuels. Collectively, the reduced subsidies are expected to amount to US$2.3 billion over the whole span. The repealing of these provisions is justified as follows: “To foster the development of a clean energy economy and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels that contribute to climate change, the Administration proposes to repeal tax provisions that preferentially benefit fossil fuel production.” They also argue that: “Repealing fossil fuel tax preferences helps eliminate market distortions, strengthening incentives for investments in clean, renewable, and more energy efficient technologies.”

This is just a start. The OMB explains that these subsidies represent less than 1% of annual domestic coal revenues, so the impact of eliminating them would be modest. Given the huge negative externalities associated with coal (particularly habitat destruction, health impacts, and climate change), coal producers and users should be facing Pigovian taxes rather than receiving subsidies. Still, this is undeniably a step in the right direction. That said, the OMB does cite an OECD study which concluded that eliminating all fossil fuel subsidies in G20 countries could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 10%.

Here’s hoping these components of the budget don’t get killed by some senator from Appalachia.

Coal and Railroading in North America since 1960

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The dieselization of North American railroading was nearing completion by 1960. The previously dominant steam engines had been removed largely not due to concern over the cost of fuel, but rather maintenance and crew costs. Steam engines were very expensive to maintain – they spent almost twice as much time in a shop than they spent pulling trains. They were also expensive to crew – for instance, a freight train pulled by two steam engines requires two complete 3 or 4 man crews, whereas a freight train pulled by a dozen diesels can be run by two men. Also, whereas a diesel can be started almost like an automobile and be ready to run in minutes, a steam engine takes hours to heat the fire and build up enough steam to move a train.

Because the move to diesel power was not motivated primarily by energy costs, the changing price gap between oil and coal did not result in railways switching back and forth between coal powered steam and oil powered diesel. If a firm had wanted to put steamers back in service, this would have been possible only through not only restoration of the locomotives, but also reconstruction of the watering infrastructure, and hiring, training and paying the large number of people required to crew the engines.

When extreme price disparity between oil and coal arose during the late 70’s oil crisis, it motivated American Coal Enterprises (ACE) to design a “modern” steam engine (which I’ve written about before on my blog). To show they were serious about coal as a still current railroading fuel, Ross Rowland (their head) acquired the use of a steam locomotive and ran it in freight service pulling coal trains – and demonstrated that even using 1950’s technology the fuel costs were lower using coal. As for crew costs, the ACE 3000 was modern – computer controlled etc, needing no more crew than a diesel. The problem of water was solved with a steam condensing system, which meant new water was required only every 1000 miles. It was also designed to require far less maintenance than steam engines of old. However, there were no orders, and the engine was never built. I think this is significant – why would no firms want to be isolated from the fluctuating price of oil? Are firms simply inherently conservative?

The problem with the conservative thesis is that there are other examples of railroads taking risks on new technologies to exploit cheap fuel – for instance Union Pacific’s GTEL (Gas Turbine Electric) locomotives of the 50’s and 60’s presented a tempting alternative to dieselization.

Unlike diesels, they were powerful (4000-8000hp), and also unlike diesels they ran on very inexpensive “Bunker C” fuel (which is nasty stuff). They were procured to replace the Big Boy steam locomotives, to pull heavy freights over the most challenging sections of UP mainline (romanticized here). There was even coal-powered variant which ran on ground up coal dust – however this proved unreliable as any oversized speck of coal would damage the turbine blades.



I think it is significant that the ACE program was never brought to fruition. Railroad firms are not inherently conservative – this is demonstrated by the GTEL locomotives, and also by CN’s TurboTrain. I think the project never came to pass because railroads in the United States are concerned with appearing modern, and forward-looking. Returning to coal fired steam power might have tainted a railroads image, and would certainly not have been perceived as environmentally friendly. With the development of the computer to the point where it became usable in capitalist products, the 1980s were a period of rapid technological development. For instance, private cars in 1980 were not so different from 1960, and by 1990 bore many of the significant changes that make cars today “modern”, i.e. computer controlled ignition and fuel injection, modern crash testing and air bags, etc. Coal was not the right fit for this forward looking time and – hopefully – it remains the wrong fuel today.

Objections: cash, jobs, and taxes

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When you tell people that coal, the oil sands, and other unconventional oil and gas should be left underground, three objections come up most often:

  1. Look at how much revenue these industries produce!
  2. And so many jobs depend on them
  3. And they provide so much tax revenue

All this, they argue, means communities and governments should welcome, or at least tolerate, these industries.

I think there are four major responses to this.

1) What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen

It is easy to tot up the revenues from oil sands producers or coal mining companies, the number of people they employ, and the taxes they pay. What is less obvious but equally real is the harm these entities produce, which is not compensated for. Air and water pollution sicken and kill people, as well as harming natural ecosystems. Mining tears up and poisons the land. Greenhouse gas emissions cause warming, extreme weather, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and many other ills.

Once all the damage caused by climate change is taken into account, it seems highly likely that these businesses actually destroy more wealth and human welfare than they create, because the indirect costs overwhelm the direct benefits.

2) What is the alternative?

We cannot keep using fossil fuels forever. We will either burn them until there are none that remain to be economically extracted, or we will stop sooner because we want to limit climate change.

Either way, the global economy is eventually going to need to rely on renewable forms of energy. All the infrastructure we are building now to support fossil fuel use will eventually be redundant and useless. At the same time, the sooner we get started on building the energy system of the future, the more time we have to work out which options are best and perfect them. A longer time horizon also means we need to invest less of our total wealth per year, in order to get the same final result.

There are big opportunities to be captured in moving to a sustainable energy system, as well. We can free ourselves from dependence on fossil fuel imports, with all the geopolitical and security implications that would have. We can free ourselves from the burden of illness and death caused by fossil fuel pollution. We can live cleaner, healthier, and safer lives.

3) The risks from climate change

I am not going to exhaustively re-explain the reasons why we should be fearful of climate change. In short, we should be worried because the warming projected just from staying on our present course of increasing emissions is on the order of 5°C. That would create a world as different from the present one as the present one is different from the depth of an ice age. The human consequences of that are impossible to fully appreciate, but certain to be highly significant.

Ken Caldiera expresses this idea very effectively:

If we already had energy and transportation systems that met our needs without using the atmosphere as a waste dump for our carbon- dioxide pollution, and I told you that you could be 2% richer, but all you had to do was acidify the oceans and risk killing off coral reefs and other marine ecosystems, risk melting the ice caps with rapid sea-level rise, shifting weather patterns so that food-growing regions might not be able to produce adequate amounts of food, and so on, would you take all of that environmental risk, just to be 2% richer?

Beyond that, the warming we are creating risks kicking off positive feedback effects, which themselves produce more warming. An especially important danger is causing the permafrost and methane clathrates to melt. The methane they contain could cause another huge dose of warming, on top of what human beings produced directly. They could even kick off runaway climate change, which could make the planet permanently inhospitable to life.

4) Ethics

To enrich yourself by causing certain harm to others, and by creating terrible risks, is surely not an ethical way to comport yourself. There is no reason why future generations deserve to inherit a wrecked and imperiled planet, and it would be preferable for them to inhabit a global economy that is already moving towards making itself sustainable.

As Henry Shue argues, climate change falls within the general moral category of the infliction of harm upon the defenceless. When we undertake activities that produce massive greenhouse gas emissions, we are playing a game of Russian Roulette with the gun pointed at the head of future generations. Even if climate change proves to be less of a problem than we legitimately fear, we are behaving unethically by forcing this risk upon them without their consent, and without them having any ability whatsoever to seek recourse from us.

The History of Wood and Coal in Industrial Transport

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Prior to the easy availability of coal, rail and ship transport in North America was powered largely by chopped wood. Up until 1870 most railway locomotives in the United States ran on wood. Sternwheelers also ran on wood when and where coal was not (yet) available. Sternwheelers on Kootenay lake for instance, burned wood until the B.C. Southern Railway was extended to Kootenay Landing, connecting the lake with the coalfields of Crowsnest Pass. The 19th century consumption of wood by steamboat was described vividly by Basil Hall in his 1828 “Travels in North America”:

“As the steam-boats on this river [the Mississippi], and indeed all over America, burn nothing but wood, and as their engines are mostly high pressure, the consumption of this bulky description of fuel is so considerable, that they are obliged to call at least twice a day at the wooding stations on the banks of the stream. The Philelphia [a sternwheeler] used about a cord of wood an hour, or 128 cubic feet. A cord consists of a pile eight feet long by four high, and four in thickness, each billet being four feet in length. Sometimes, when we were pushing hard, we burnt 30 cords in a day.” (Vol. 3 page 348)

At this rate of wood consumption, one can imagine that the impact on the forest by even one sternwheeler would be obvious to passengers. John H. White’s book on 19th century American Railroading cites a peak wood consumption by U.S. railroads of 3.6 million cords per year.  Using the average “one cord per acre per year” rule, sustainable production of that amount of fuel would require more than 14 thousand square kilometres of forest. At a time when America had only 30,000 miles of trackage, whereas the current U.S. trackage is over 230,000 miles. Tonnage shipped has likely increased by a much greater ratio than that due to the increases in the power, weight and frequency of freight trains. Suffice it to say, it is unlikely that it would be possible to run the contemporary American rail network on wood powered steam locomotives today. In fact, we can probably attribute the continued growth of rail in the 19th century after the 1860s to developments in coal extraction – by 1880 trackage had increased to 90 thousand miles, while consumption of wood was cut to a third of the 1860s numbers.

The bitter truth, however, is that while superficially the forest powered infrastructure was much more environmentally destructive than the current coal and oil powered fleet,  the current system is  in reality worse by an order of magnitude. Deforestation is a real problem, but forests can grow back in the matter of a few generations, or at worst, centuries. Deforestation alone likely can not cause run away climate change. On the other hand, while the carbon spilled into the atmosphere by coal and oil based transportation systems has no obvious immediate effect,  in the medium to long term it has the disastrous effects of climate change, and if not mitigated, run-away climate change.

The implication of this contrast to me is the following: environmentalism as appreciation for our life-world in lived experience is insufficient for the problem of fossil fuel caused climate change. If all U.S. forests had been cut down to run trains, this would be an environmental disaster – but one which would likely precipitate a populist environmental response out of people’s experience of seeing the forests retreat. Analogous experiences of climate change are comparatively rare and murky (i.e. observations of glacier retreat), and have not yet been sufficient to garner the political will necessary to stop climate change. The connection between an engine spewing CO2 and a retreating glacier is infinitely less obvious than the connection between a chugging train and a retreating forest.

Coal is temporary

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For a moment, ignore all the environmental and climatic consequences of burning coal. Thought of only as an energy source, it is nonetheless demonstrably finite. Cambridge Professor (and Chief Scientific Adviser of the Department of Energy and Climate Change in the United Kingdom) David MacKay ran some of the math on the stuff:

In 2006, the coal consumption rate was 6.3 Gt per year. Comparing this with reserves of 1600 Gt of coal, people often say “there’s 250 years of coal left.” But if we assume “business as usual” implies a growing consumption, we get a different answer. If the growth rate of coal consumption were to continue at 2% per year (which gives a reasonable fit to the data from 1930 to 2000), then all the coal would be gone in 2096. If the growth rate is 3.4% per year (the growth rate over the last decade), the end of business-as-usual is coming before 2072. Not 250 years, but 60!

And, going back to climate change for a moment, we ought to remember that coal-fired power plants with carbon capture and storage equipment will use coal less efficiently to produce electricity. This is because some of the energy contains in the fuel will need to be dedicated to separating the carbon dioxide from the other flue gases (which, like air, are mostly nitrogen), then to pressurizing or liquefying the CO2, transporting it, and injecting it underground. It will also take energy to build the infrastructure necessary to perform these tasks.

Another thing to keep in mind is energy return on investment. Naturally, we started by exploiting the fossil fuel resources that were cheapest and easiest to extract: oil that literally shot up into the air when you sank a well. Now, we are in the world of difficult and expensive fossil fuels: those that take a lot of energy to get at and then process into usable fuels. We are certainly farther along when it comes to unconventional oil than when it comes to coal, but the same logic will eventually bite for the solid fuel. As such, the last portions of the global coal reserve will surely yield less energy for us than the first ones did, provided we don’t shift away from coal long before we get to those last reserves (which, because of climate change, we must).

As with all fossil fuels, coal has no long-term future. All of this is relevant because it illuminates the choice we are making. It’s not between a future that runs forever on coal (with climate change risks) and a future that runs on inexhaustible renewable forms of energy. It is between moving away from coal now, when it is still possible to save the climate, or doing so at the bitter end, once we have severely undermined the ability of the planet to support human life and prosperity. For everyone who isn’t the owner of a coal mine or a coal-fired power plant, this seems like a pretty easy choice.