Powering the Future: A Scientist's Guide to Energy Independence

by Daniel B. Botkin

  Mining coal

  Mining coal is one of the major ways that people move the surface of the Earth. Of the 8 billion tons of stone, rock, gravel, sand, and soil that people move each year in the United States, 15% (1.1 billion tons) is from mining coal. That’s almost as much as from farming (16%) and about one-third the amount that U.S. rivers move naturally (not counting the amount of material rivers remove because of erosion from agriculture).13 Much of the rest (3 billion tons, almost half of all the earth-moving that Americans do) is due to road building.14

  Strip mining

  There are two kinds of coal mining: strip mining (also called surface mining) and underground mining. Strip mining provides more than half the coal in the United States and has been especially damaging to land, rivers, and ecosystems.15 In the Appalachians alone, coal strip mining has destroyed more than 1,500 square miles—an area as big as Rhode Island—including 500 mountains and 1,000 miles of rivers and streams.16

  A classic book about the effects of coal mining in the Appalachian Mountains is Night Comes to the Cumberlands, by Harry Caudill.17 He tells the story of the poor Appalachian Kentucky farmers who owned the land in the Appalachian hills and mountains but were often unaware that they owned only the surface rights, not the mineral rights. (In the United States, rarely if ever does land ownership include owning the mineral rights. I learned this the hard way when I bought a house in Santa Barbara, once a major oil field, and attempted to buy the mineral rights. Try as I might, I was not able to purchase them, nor even to learn who actually owned them.)

  Strip mining came to the Cumberland Mountains big-time in the 1950s. Previously, this mining method had been limited to comparatively flat lands to the west. But with the end of World War II, big machines—bulldozers and other earth movers—made it possible to strip the mountains.

  The coal mining companies let the mountain landowners pay property taxes until the companies were ready to mine the coal. Then they would arrive with their big machines and knock down whatever was in the way, including houses. Legally, the mining companies “...could build roads wherever they desired, even through lawns and fertile vegetable gardens,” Caudill writes. “They could sluice poisonous water from the pits onto crop lands. With impunity they could hurl out from their washeries clouds of coal grit which settled on fields of corn, alfalfa and clover and rendered them worthless as fodder. Fumes from burning slate dumps peeled paint from houses, but the companies were absolved from damages.”18 The story Caudill tells is one of the saddest in American environmental history. He writes:

  The cumulative effects of the wrecking of a coal-filled mountain stagger the imagination. Let us suppose the ridge contains three seams of coal, and that the company first strip-mines the bottommost seam. A few years later it returns to a higher seam midway up the mountain and cuts high walls of fifty or sixty feet in its sides. Then to crown its enterprise its shovels and bulldozers slice off the top of the mountain to recover all of the highest seam. Within a dozen years it has dug millions of tons of coal and made a profit of millions of dollars. But in the process it has totally transformed one of earth’s terrain features. A relatively stable mountain, whose soil and water were to a high degree protected by grass and trees, has been reduced to a colossal rubble heap.19

  As Caudill makes clear, strip mining completed the deforestation that had started with small-time logging in the late 19th century. It also removed the soil, thereby increasing sediment transport downstream. Sulfur in the coal—an impurity—acidified water draining out of a mine, denuding the land and destroying wildlife and fish populations, habitats, and ecosystems downstream.

  The most damaging variation on strip mining is mountaintop removal (Figure 3.4): The tops of mountains are cut away, the coal is removed, and the waste is pushed into the valleys. This is obviously highly destructive, increasing the chance of floods and bringing toxic mine waste to the surface.

  Figure 3.4 Mountaintop removal at the Martiki mine in Martin County, Kentucky. One such strip-mined area covers 7,000 acres. (Photo by Vivian Stockman / www.ohvec.org. Flyover courtesy SouthWings.org.)

  In response to complaints, the federal government began to require that strip-mined land be restored and that mining companies build holding ponds to contain the acidified water. The results have been mixed at best. Relatively little land has been restored, and even what has been “restored” is little like what had been there before. Holding ponds fail—for example, an earth dam near Inez, Kentucky, gave way on October 11, 2000, releasing 250 million gallons of wastewater from coal mines, a spill larger than that of the Exxon Valdez. The release is said to have turned the river “an iridescent black” for 75 miles downstream and killed all aquatic life, including several hundred thousand fish, for more than 100 miles.20 Kentucky has 58 such dams.

  Surface-mining practices are supposed to have improved since the 1950s, and land is supposed to be restored. But a 2005 article in the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier Journal, written by a person who revisited old mining areas, said that the laws passed to “control the devastation of strip mining for coal . . . have been ineffective in controlling an industry that has gone wild since the energy shortage has driven the price of coal up to $100 a ton.”21 Other stories about strip mining include a description of one mine in Wyoming, abandoned about a half century ago and “restored,” that still has no vegetation.22

  Underground mining

  We have focused so far on surface mining, but 40% of coal mining in the United States is underground, and of the 82,000 people who work in coal mining in the U.S., 53% are involved in underground mining versus 47% in surface mining.

  Coal has been dug out of the ground and used as a fuel by people for thousands of years. In fact, some archaeological evidence suggests that coal was sought and used for heating perhaps more than 100,000 years ago. Coal mining appears to have been active in China for thousands of years, perhaps 10,000. In the Americas, the Aztecs were the first to use coal, both decoratively and as a fuel. European settlers began to mine coal in the mid-18th century. With the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and especially with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine, coal mining became a major activity, important for fueling the new industrial age.

  At first, coal was obtained from places where it came to the surface or from shallow mines. Large-scale underground mining developed in the 19th century, and disasters—cave-ins and explosions—became part of it. The biggest coal mining disaster in Great Britain killed more than 400 miners. In the U.S., the worst was an explosion in a coal mine in Monongah, West Virginia, that killed 362 people. The collapse of part of a coal mine in Huntington, Utah, in August 2007, reminded people of the dangers of this work.

  As tragic as these are, the larger-scale impacts on health and environment are worse. Underground mining, like surface mining, produces acid mine drainage. Sometimes land collapses above mines (this is called subsidence), and sometimes underground fires start in coal beds and persist for years over large areas. One of the most notorious started in 1961 in Centralia, Pennsylvania, with a trash fire that spread to coal seams and is still burning today (Figure 3.5). As a result, Centralia has become a ghost town.23

  Figure 3.5 A fire that started in 1961 in an underground coal bed in Centralia, Pennsylvania, still burns in this photograph taken in January 2008. (PA Department of Environmental Protection. Photos and commentary by Donald Davis, www.offroaders.com/album/centralia/photos36.htm)

  Centralia’s fire isn’t the only one. An underground fire that started around 1915 on land owned by the Red Ash Coal Company in Laurel Run, Pennsylvania, has continued over the years. In the 1960s, homes, schools, and stores were abandoned, and the fire is still burning today.24 A total of 45 mine fires continue to burn in Pennsylvania.25

  Underground coal fires are also a problem in China,26 where such fires are estimated to release more greenhouse gases every year than all the cars in Germany, according to the International Institute for Geo-information, Science a
nd Earth Observation (ITC), in the Netherlands.27 Worldwide, according to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, “Fires are burning in thousands of underground coal seams from Pennsylvania to Mongolia, releasing toxic gases, adding millions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and baking the earth until vegetation shrivels and the land sinks.”28 The federal Office of Surface Mining says that the costs of such fires in the United States have reached nearly $1 billion.29

  A large-scale form of underground mining is longwall mining, in which a long wall—up to about 1,200 feet long—is mined as a single unit in one long slice by a machine called a shearer. The shearer has cutting drums and hydraulic rams run by electric motors and is somewhat analogous to the huge machines that dig tunnels. Longwall mining is efficient and safer for miners, but it can lead to serious subsidence of the land surface after the walls of coal have been removed.

  Burning coal as fuel is a major source of air pollution

  Coal is one of the leading causes of smog, acid rain, other toxic substances that get into the air, and greenhouse gases. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, “10.3 million tons of sulfur dioxide were released from U.S. power plants in 2004, 95 percent of these emissions coming from coal-fired plants.” Similarly, more than 90% of the 3.9 million tons of nitrogen oxides released each year come from coal-fired units. Coal-fired power plants also put into the air approximately 48 tons of mercury, 56 tons of arsenic, 62 tons of lead, 62 tons of chromium compounds, 23,000 tons of hydrogen fluoride, and 134,000 tons of hydrochloric acid each year.30 Coal produces one-third of all carbon dioxide emitted by human activities in the United States.

  As most of us are aware by now, air pollution is a significant cause of death. An analysis by the Sierra Club suggests that in the U.S. alone “cutting power plant emissions by 75% could avoid more than 18,000 of the deaths caused by particle pollution.”31 In China, almost 14% of adult deaths result from pulmonary diseases, making these the second-largest single cause of adult deaths.32 Although it is not easy to tie down the relationship precisely, pulmonary diseases appear to be closely related to air pollution and, therefore, to coal burning.33

  Sulfur and nitrogen oxides emitted from burning coal create acids when mixed with water. This acid rain has been shown to affect bodies of freshwater and cause a variety of problems for freshwater life, including developmental malformations of freshwater animals. It is also believed to affect forest and grassland ecosystems, but the evidence is still mixed and not conclusive.

  Black Mesa

  One of the most notorious and contentious cases of air pollution from a coal-fired power plant in the United States is the Black Mesa project at the Four Corners (where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet) in the U.S. Southwest. Black Mesa mine is three interconnected stories: one about a huge coal strip-mining operation; another about the use of water from the Navajo aquifer to move the mined coal; and the third about the Mojave Power Plant that burned the coal and operated from 1971 until the end of 2005.34

  The Black Mesa stories began in 1964 when the Peabody Western Coal Company signed a contract with the Navajo and Hopi tribes allowing the company to strip-mine coal on the Indian lands and pump water from the aquifer on the reservations to transport the coal to a huge new electric power plant. The Black Mesa mine, together with the Kayenta mine nearby, both operated by Peabody Western Coal Company, covered 62,753 acres on Navajo and Hopi land. The original agreement is contentious, with representatives of the two tribes claiming that a few individuals sold out to their own benefit without adequately reviewing the arrangement with the rest of the people of the tribes. The agreement allowed the Peabody Coal Company to remove 670 million tons of an estimated 21 billion tons of coal that lie within the area.35 When operating, the mine produced 4.8 million tons of coal a year. And every day, 3.3 million gallons of groundwater was pumped from the Navajo Aquifer 120 miles away to create a slurry with the coal that could then be pumped to the power station (the only such coal-slurry transportation in operation).

  The Navajo Aquifer lies beneath both Hopi and Navajo nations in northeastern Arizona and is considered by them sacred water. Now, however, the water stored in the aquifer has decreased, creating water-supply problems for the Navajo and Hopi. Black Mesa Indigenous Support, a group that describes itself as “350 Dineh residents of Black Mesa,” states that “the Peabody Coal Company pumped 1.3 billion gallons of pristine water a year out of an ancient sandstone aquifer that lies beneath the Hopi and Navajo lands.” This organization also states that, as a result, “wells and springs have dried up and the entire ecology of Black Mesa has changed. Plants have failed to reseed and certain native vegetation has died out.” Water levels have dropped by more than 100 feet in some wells, the group says, and concludes that “these developments threaten the viability of the region’s primary water source.”36

  Black Mesa coal fueled the 1,500-megawatt Mojave Power Station operated by Southern California Edison (SCE) and primarily owned by that company. SCE received 56% (885 megawatts) of the power, sharing the rest with three other owners: Salt River Project, which received 20% (316 megawatts); Nevada Power Company, 14% (221 megawatts); and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, 10% (158 megawatts).37 It produced enough electricity for 1 million people in California.

  Controversies about Black Mesa erupted both locally and nationally. Locally, the Navajo and Hopi tribes battled against the use of their water and destruction and pollution of their lands. Nationally, environmental groups battled against large-scale environmental pollution from the Mojave Generating Station, which emitted more than 40,000 tons of sulfur dioxide a year (making it one of the largest sources of this pollutant in the western states), as well as 19,201 tons of nitrogen oxides, 1,924 tons of particulate matter, and about 10 million tons of carbon dioxide.38

  In 1998, three environmental organizations—Grand Canyon Trust, Sierra Club, and the National Parks and Conservation Association—filed suit against the owners of Mojave because of widespread pollution from the plant, reaching to the Grand Canyon and affecting visibility there since the 1980s.39 The Navajo and Hopi tribes also sued the owners of the power plant several times.40 One result was that the EPA established guidelines to reduce the Mojave Station’s air pollutant emissions. It was estimated that the required pollution controls would cost $1 billion.41 The plant closed at the end of 2005 because of noncompliance, and it is unclear whether it will reopen.42, 43

  Strip mining in the Kentucky Cumberland Mountains and strip mining and coal burning to produce electric power near the border between Arizona and Nevada are similar stories. Both involve large corporations and the people living on land above the coal. The seemingly easy money paid to residents to give up their rights and allow mining on their land destroys the land and its resources. Although a lot is said about making coal into a clean fuel, good for people, that has not been the general history of coal mining. Money from this “black gold” attracts people and corporations. In the past, including the recent past, laws have not been adequate to prevent large-scale environmental damage.

  Financial costs of environmental damage from coal

  It’s hard to assess the total cost of mitigating environmental damage from mining and burning coal. Under U.S. federal law, funds are available to restore abandoned coal mine lands, as follows:

  Title IV of the Surface Mining Law—the Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Program—provides for the restoration of lands mined and abandoned or left inadequately restored before August 3, 1977. Implementation is accomplished through an Emergency Program (for problems having a sudden danger that presents a high probability of substantial harm to the health, safety, or general welfare of people before the danger can be abated under normal program operating procedures) and a nonemergency program. States and tribes with approved programs carry out these responsibilities. Since 1979, when the states began receiving abandoned mine land administrative grants to operate their programs and construction grants
to complete reclamation projects, through September 30, 2004, $3,579,356,901 was distributed from the fund. 44

  Since 1996, the Federal Surface Mining Law has authorized the government to award grants to regulate coal mining. By 2004, more than $3.5 billion had been paid out.45

  The future of coal power

  One good thing about coal is that there’s a lot of it. Another good thing about coal is that it is cheap, at least with today’s price supports and subsidies, and as long as only the extraction and transportation costs are included; energy from gas and oil costs about 6 times what it costs from coal. But in 2009 the U.S. Energy Information Agency recalculated the costs to mine coal and determined that at $10.50/ton, the cost a few years ago, only 6% of the coal in Wyoming, the country’s largest reserve, would be economically recoverable.46 At the time of this writing, the average sale price for Wyoming coal is $11.39 per ton, and the average price of all coal in the U.S. is $43.53/ton.47 The present cost in the U.S. is $8.5/ ton. The question is at what cost per ton would the cost of electrical energy from coal equal that produced by wind and solar energy.