Coal production by region

That's exactly why they've turned to quarry mining here. (4.00 / 2)

Clem, you and I know that it's not mountain top removal when they blast 600 vertical ft. or more of a mountain away. It's not even surface mining when they go deeper than the topmost strata located less that fifteen feet deep.

And when you think about it, out west they where they quarry mine coal, it's a heck of a lot easier to reclaim back to the original approximate contours because they haven't shoved all the waste into a deep valley.   That's why Randy Huffman is
stalling the OSM from enforcing SMCRA.

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by: One Citizen @ Sun Sep 20, 2009 at 20:27:58 PM UTC

Yup. Geology is in their favor. (4.00 / 1)

Another chart for you. This tells more of the story:

Even though the chart is called labor productivity, it's not a slight on this region's coal miners. This is all about how much work is involved to get to the coal. We have really small seams left here, they've got really big ones out West. We've been mining coal here for 140 years, our land is spent.

The three Appalachian regions are behind the Illinois Basin and the Gulf Coast Lignite Region and way, way, way behind the West Regions in labor productivity.

That's a big reason why the Appalachian Coal industry is at the end of the line. When Rahall let slip there's 20 years of major coal mining left in W.Va., this is what he's talking about.

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by: Clem Guttata @ Sun Sep 20, 2009 at 20:59:23 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

sign of decline (4.00 / 2)

West Virginia electric plants receive some of their coal from the Powder River Basin (MT/WY). I found that info on a chart where it's hard to tell the exact amount. It appears in 2006 it was about 3 million short tons (?), which would be somewhere about 10% of total (?).

If someone wants to look up the exact numbers, here's where the chart data came from:

Source: Volumes of coal produced in the Powder River Basin and received by powerplants, by State location of powerplant for 2006 and 1998. Data are from Form 423, "Monthly report of cost and quality of fuels for electric plants," compiled by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and augmented by Platts COALDAT database (Platts COALDAT, 2008).

The sulfur content is high in remaining Appalachian coal and low in current Powder River Basin (PRB) coal. I wonder how much of that PRB usage is driven by trying to hit sulfur targets.

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by: Clem Guttata @ Sun Sep 20, 2009 at 21:52:32 PM UTC

"In a few decades, Big Coal will completely move on." (0.00 / 0)

if true, then all the more reason to mine the hell out of it now.

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by: stevewvu @ Mon Sep 21, 2009 at 16:32:26 PM UTC

New Deal anyone? (0.00 / 0)

The key word is REMEDIATION. What with more than 400 coal slurry injection sites and countless abandoned sludge impoundments all containing hundreds of billions of tons heavy metals and other carcinogens, WV is potentially one bodacious Superfund site.  And if our DEP doesn't start enforcing soon, the feds will move in. Its just too bad that the fines will go into federal coffers instead of straight to the state.  On the upside, scofflaw companies will be paying federally enforced Davis bacon wages to Americans for cleanup instead of state officials being bribed to look the other way as Blankenship imports hordes of Mexicans to lean on shovels.

And heck, just think of it, stevewvu, enforcing SMCRA regs requiring approximate original contours alone could put potentially thousands of West Virginians back to work.

I'm sure that the prospect of putting West Virginians to work across the southern coalfields cleaning up the environment thrills you almost as much as it does me.

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by: One Citizen @ Tue Sep 22, 2009 at 13:16:59 PM UTC

[ Parent ]