Coal Mining and Burning
Coal is Back!
With oil and gas prices rising due to depletion and electric demand continuing to increase, coal is becoming increasingly popular, causing coal prices to rise with increased coal demand. As of June 2006, an estimated 255 new coal power plants and coal to oil refineries were proposed. Leading the way with the most proposals have been Illinois, Texas, Kentucky, Montana, Ohio, Texas, Colorado and Florida. Many of these proposals have now been defeated by activist efforts or withdrawn due to the rising costs of coal and related construction costs. Plans for 59 coal plants were scrapped in 2007 alone.
Energy Justice Network runs the only national network of grassroots community activists fighting the new wave of coal power plant proposals. If you're fighting a coal plant of any sort and would like to be part of our "No New Coal Plants" network (as profiled in Orion Magazine), please contact us.
For a list of the 150-some proposed coal power plants that the Department of Energy is tracking, see their Tracking New Coal-Fired Power Plants report. For earlier versions of this report, see our archive of previous DOE coal reports. For a more complete accounting of proposals (and defeated plants) see the CoalSwarm Wiki and the Coal Moratorium Now websites.
In addition there are over 400 ethanol plants proposed, many of which would be fueled by mini-coal power plants of their own.
Some of the new proposed power plants are for burning waste coal, a byproduct of poor mining practices. For more information on waste coal, see our waste coal page.
These is also a new wave of coal-to-oil refineries planned for several U.S. states and a few other countries. For information on the proposals for converting coal to liquid transportation fuels, see our site on coal-to-oil refineries.
Where is the coal?
Here are two good maps from the Energy Information Administration:
Coal-Bearing Areas of the United States and Coal Supply Regions
Glossary of Coal Terms
Coal-Fired Power Plants
Where is coal mining causing severe disruption to human communities and the environment?
General Resources:
Appalachia:
Midwest: Hoosier Environmental Council
Southwest (Navajo and Hopi lands): Black Mesa Indigenous Support
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The dangerous lives of miners are legendary; but the environmental destruction of mining is largely ignored. Coal mining, like logging, has become an industry of enormous machines, not of men.
Shaft mining used to be done with pick axes or drills; now it's done by massive mechanical worms and called longwall mining. It causes massive property damage, with homes and highways collapsing in its wake. Strip mining, instead of burrowing to the coal, scrapes off the layers of soil and rock covering the coal. Mountaintop removal cuts the tops from mountains to expose the coal and dumps the mountain tops and coal waste into adjoining valleys.
Water usually suffers first and longest from mining. A lot of water is used directly for mining processes, which results in huge accumulations of slurry. Machines cut through aquifers and saturated rock, which can shift underground water flows, causing wells and springs to go dry. Streams buried by mountain tops are permanently destroyed. Residual acid mine drainage is a common source of stream death in the old mining areas of the eastern U.S.
Remediation is the attempt to make a mined landscape resemble its former self. Remediation efforts can address acid mine drainage, water flow, tailings piles, topography, and more. It's the only option a devastated community has available to ask for, it can be better done or worse done, but it is ultimately limited. Remediation cannot restore an area that has been devastated, it can only find work-arounds for the water problems and disguise the jumbled rock under a veneer of greenery. In states with lax environmental standards, mines are increasingly being used as dumps for toxic sewage sludge, dredge spoils and fly ash, and other wastes, in the name of remediation.
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What about "Clean-er Coal Technology"?
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"Clean coal" is a myth. It's goal is to reduce air emissions, which is good and needed. However, that should not lull anyone into thinking that coal mining would be any less destructive. Indeed, mine sites employing coal washing treatments could make the slurry lagoons even more toxic as contaminants are removed from the coal. Such things as radiation, mercury and fluoride don't go away, they just go somewhere else.
See our page on so-called "clean coal" for more information.
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