Tech Talk - Coal mining continues to produce

Sadly I was away from home last week to attend a family funeral in Northumberland where, for the past nine generations including mine, our family have been miners. The funeral was for my father’s sister, Linda, who had documented early life in the mining village of Ashington in her books “A Tune for Bears to Dance To,” and “The Pit Village and the Store.” The latter was made into a docu-drama for British Channel Four television. The hotel at which we stayed was next to the Woodhorn Mining Museum which has been built around the colliery offices from the old mine. The rest of the property has been turned into a nature park – with a little twist.

Figure 1. Part of the old mine site, now the Queen Elizabeth II Country Park, with a 40 acre lake. Note the wind turbines in the background – all but one of the 14 were turning during my stay. (Hotel on the right)

The site is also now home to considerable bird life – including over three dozen swans that I counted as I meandered around the lake.

Figure 2. Some of the birds on the lake at Woodhorn

Much of this part of Northumberland has changed considerably since the time – over 50 years ago – that I was an Indentured Apprentice in the National Coal Board working at Seghill Colliery, though on day release once a week to Ashington Technical College. One of the greater changes is illustrated in the background to a painting of my father that my aunt painted.

Figure 3. My Dad as Undermanager at Ashington (note the yard stick, the safety lamp is hidden by the coat). (Linda McCullough-Thew)

The large mounds are the pit heaps which were scattered all around the road as the bus carried me from Newcastle to the pit. They are all gone now, and the land is restored and, as the pictures above testify, now visually contaminated by the latest form of energy generation, though that doesn’t seem to worry the red squirrels and the geese.

Figure 4. Pit heap dominating the miners houses (Sunderland Public Library)

I thought of that as the recent reports on the devastation that mining creates are once again headlining the problems as new and enlarged lignite mines are developing in Europe. The transition to mining lignite, which contains considerable quantities of water and is a geological precursor to the black bituminous and anthracite coals that are preferred, is coming because it is considerably cheaper than alternate sources and nations have it at hand, instead of having to spend currency on importing alternate and increasingly expensive fuels from elsewhere. The reason that lignite is attractive is that the black coal seams that used to be mined in much of Europe have been mined out at currently economic depths, and lignite – even though less energy intense – has become an economically viable alternative.

To mine the surface deposits Europeans rely on the Bucketwheel Excavator (video here) with one machine replacing 40,000 men with picks and shovels (the way I was initially taught to mine). The overlying rock and soil (overburden) is first removed and stored, and then, once the coal has been removed, the land is restored with very stringent requirements for the condition of that restoration, so that in many cases the stone walls around the fields are replaced and the appearance of the land is similar to what was there before.

At present surface mining is becoming the dominant method for coal production. The thick seams in Wyoming and Montana have huge reserves, and the coal is very simple to mine and remove. Once mined it is trucked away from the machines and loaded into rail cars which then carry the coal around the nation. Because this coal has a low sulfur content it has proved competitive even against the more local coals of the East, which must often now be expensively mined from the underground. As the Wall Street Journal recently noted two counties in Wyoming now account for 40% of the US coal mined, while underground mines are closing in Appalachia.

After seeing a drop in coal production of around 9% as coal fired power plants were replaced by natural gas in the 2011 to 2013 time frame, the EIA is now projecting that US coal demand will increase by 3.6% this year, as natural gas prices rise. This will be followed by a 2.5% decline in 2015 as the new EPA regulations bite harder in driving the closure/transition of power plants. However US natural gas prices continue to be much lower than those in most of the rest of the world, and thus, as the WSJ notes , overall coal production in the USA is likely to stabilize around current levels for the next three decades, while domestic demand reduction is offset by increasing demands for coal from other countries which will continue to find it a cheaper alternative.

Much of the alternative replacement fuels for coal (and in some cases nuclear) are presumed to be from the increased levels of shale gas that are being produced in the United States, and which are projected to become domestic sources of fuel in many other countries around the world , including Europe. However while the plans and actions to close coal fired power plants proceed apace the rate and scale at which alternate sources of energy, particularly European shale gas, will appear are much less certain.

And in the interim, as coal mines have found better ways of processing the coal to meet power station demands, the potential for growth still exists, as the recent example in the Illinois Basin shows, where Sunrise Coal are planning to open a new underground mine in Vermillion IL this year, producing around 3 million tons of coal a year. The mine will use room and pillar mining to ensure that there is no surface ground subsidence, which can be a problem in the Illinois Basin.

And those who anticipate that China and India will reduce coal demand in order to overcome the problems that they have with air pollution, should remember that air pollution in the UK was at least as bad in the early 1060’s but by changing the way in which coal was burned the air was cleaned, and Britain continues to rely on coal for a significant portion of its electrical power.

Tech Talk - The evil in the hearts of men.

It was Edmund Burke who said "The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing," and with a hat-tip to Bishop Hill who drew my attention to the testimony, I think I had better say something.

Back in the days when I left school the United Kingdom, and most of Europe, was finally emerging from the brutal impacts of the Second World War. That recovery was helped immeasurably by the coal mining industry where thousands of men labored underground across Europe to ensure that adequate power was available to supply the needs of their various countries as industrial capacity was restored. As an eighteen-year old indentured Apprentice I laid on my back in 20-inch high coal to shovel the 15-tons of my ordained shift onto the conveyor, and braced the roof over my head with hand-sawn timber props to hold it for the following week, as we moved the longwall face forward. I was paid just over four pounds a week, but they did allow me, on Wednesdays, to go to the local Technical College in Ashington where I studied from 8 am until 8 pm. In the good weeks I could then go home, but in the alternate weeks I was either on foreshift, which meant that I went to college directly from the mine, or nightshift, when I went from the college to the mine and worked the following shift. I was woken more than once from an exhausted sleep having fallen into the corridor on the bus. Men died in those mines that I worked in to ensure that Britain had the power that it needed to recover and rebuild.

I thus find myself seriously affronted when this industry (and myself), are called evil by some academic from Oxford, no matter how illustrious his qualifications. In his testimony before the House of Lords Committee on “The Economic Impact on UK Energy Policy of Shale Gas and Oil “ last week, Professor Dieter Helm said

Of course one would want to make sure that regulators are on top of any environmental consequences that might flow from drilling, but I find it truly extraordinary that people want to ban fracking in a context where they are not prepared to ban coal mining, and indeed across Europe actually promote coal mining. When one thinks about the relative environmental impacts of the alternatives, coal mining is truly evil in comparison. I find it extraordinary that people are legally allowed to mine coal if you want at the same time to have a blanket ban on shale gas extraction.

It is almost a throw-away line, a necessary genuflection to the politically correct views of the day, a glib reference to transient effects long recognized and ameliorated by the coal industry over the past decades.

In those days of my youth, back in 1962, I walked into Newcastle to take the first bus of the morning from the terminal to the mine some 11 miles away at Seghill. It drove past pit heap after pit heap, and the impacts that Professor Helm is I believe referring to were real, and evident. The mine I worked in was over a hundred years old, and my father had been manager there when my brother was born. You walked stooped for part of the way to the face, since the roof of the passage was low, though the temperatures were pleasant, year round. Coal moved by conveyor and mine car, once hand-loaded from the blasted face, and supplies came in on carts hauled by pit ponies – another unforgettable memory. Hundreds of men worked at each mine, with a typical stint being a 10-yard length along the 200-yard measure of each longwall. We were not evil, the industry was not evil – it was vital and necessary. And it has changed.

Instead of walking there are now mine cars that haul workers to the face, electric trams have replaced ponies, and machines now do the work that muscle did back in those days. Where then is the evil? Is it that we are removing material from the ground? But unless you wish to go back to human densities of 70 people per hundred square miles of the hunter:gatherer era this must happen, for if they aren't grown resources must still be mined from the earth.

Yes there are transient effects, but if instead of dwelling on the ugliness of the excavation on some cold wet day when the shadows are right to emulate some hellish landscape, one were to go back five years after the mine has moved on (presuming that this is some surface site) then those wounds from current mines have gone. Laws require, and company self-interest demands, that land be restored. In parts of the world that can realize unexpected benefits as the land becomes more productive than it was before. You can no longer find much negative evidence of the underground mines in the area I worked in.

But the intent of this post is not to pat myself on the back, nor to run off on a rising rant, but rather to point out a problem which this broadly prevalent and stridently negative attitude is generating. Early this morning I received a call soliciting funds for the Footsteps Program at the University of Leeds, where I was awarded my degrees. But I had to gently break it to the young student calling that I could not participate because the University had done away with the Mining Engineering program through which I obtained my degrees. Further they have turned over the building, donated to the University by the industry and its workers for such studies, to the Art Department.

Leeds is not alone, the Royal School of Mines, merged now into Imperial College, London no longer offers mining courses.. The Welsh School of Mines, now the University of South Wales, no longer offers mining courses – there is but one place in the UK, at what was Cambourne School of Mines but is now the Penryn campus of the University of Exeter, where such a course still exists.

This image of the industry as an evil entity is ironic given, as Professor Helm pointed out:

Practically now, in Europe and the UK, we are switching from gas to coal. We have gone from about 28% of our electricity generated by coal a couple of years ago to about 40% today. Germany is bringing 7 to 8 gigawatts of new coal on to its system. Coal stations are being built across eastern Europe. The coal burn generally has gone up across Europe. Germany has gone from nuclear to coal and from gas to coal. This is a really serious environmental development across Europe.

For many years the rational pursuit of energy policy in many parts of the world was hindered by the demonization of nuclear power. It has taken that industry many years to work through the opprobrium that hindered realistic discussions of costs and benefits, and it is only now that some of the green community are beginning to recognize the irrationality of some of their earlier arguments. Yet the vilification of that industry cost it an entire generation of management and engineers who were persuaded to avoid such a career and who starved the industry of a strong supply of graduates. Now that engineers are needed there not that many with long experience, since the generation running the industry is retiring.

And here we are seeing a growth in the demand for coal, and yet – in part because of the demonization of the industry – there are but limited places where qualified engineers can be found, and at a time when advanced levels of technology will be called for as deposits get leaner, deeper and more difficult to extract there are even fewer places that can carry out the needed research into excavation technology.

Sadly academia and government seem to be unwilling to face the reality of the future that these circumstances will bring. Because the situation cannot be reversed in a year or two, as the knowledge base fades (as it now rapidly is) so it will become harder and harder to meet global needs. But no doubt academia will find a way to blame that on us miners, the few of them that will remain.

Someone told me once – “if you want to find gratitude, you’ll find it in the dictionary, between chump and sucker*.” But, one might have thought that for those who claim to predict the future, perhaps the occasional thought of self-interest might burble its way through, but not, I suppose, at Oxford.

*the statement has been modified for a general audience.“