Coal news and updates

The broad high prairie of eastern Wyoming and southern Montana was once the bottom of a shallow sea, a rich subtropical swampland for millions of years. Layers of plants began forming peat beds 60 million years ago, later to be buried and compressed into bituminous coal strata. 

 

The Missouri River became the dominant stream as the Northern Rockies formed, with tributaries like the Yellowstone, Powder and Cheyenne rivers running north and east to meet it. Their erosion eventually left coal seams only a few feet beneath the land surface of what today is called the Powder River Basin. 

 

No other coal seam on the planet is so big, so close to the surface, and so cheap to mine, said Thomas Michael Power, a professor emeritus at the University of Montana who studies energy economics. 

 

A national debate

Today the massive deposits, enough to light the United States almost into the 23rd century, have become the center of a regional – and increasingly national – debate: Should this resource continue to be developed, how will it get to market and what is that market? The coal is so cheap that companies see profit in shipping it west via vast trains, a half-mile or more long, then clear across the Pacific Ocean to meet Asia's seemingly insatiable demand.

 

There is also concern over the role coal plays in global warming and health impacts. Coal is the "dirtiest" fossil fuels, emitting mercury, nitrogen oxides, sulfur – and 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide for every ton of ore burned. Natural gas emits about half as much of the greenhouse gas. According to the Energy Information Agency, coal is source of 44 percent of global energy-related CO2 emissions.

 

Coal center

There's strong history here in the basin. And no shortage of conflict.

 

The region has been a western center of the American coal industry since the 19th century. Only after Clean Air Act amendments required lower sulfur levels in 1990 did the Basin's low-sulfur bituminous and subbituminous coal become the dominant U.S. coal for generating electricity, power and heat nationwide.

 

This rich grassland was home to herds of bison and native Cheyenne, Crow and Lakota who were forcefully displaced by white pioneers and settlers, who then grazed thousands of head of cattle. Much of this 26,000-square-mile area is still grazed on a combination of private ranches, national grassland administered by the Department of Agriculture, and grazing allotments run by the Bureau of Land Management. BLM also controls the coal, oil and other mineral rights; today that's where the money is.

 

The drive to develop coal has increasingly pitted ranchers against mining companies in a fight for water resources. Aquifers, pierced by mines, are draining away. What is sweet summer grassland to a rancher is overburden to be scraped away by a miner. Grazing allotments literally disappear as the U.S. Forest Service declares pasture unavailable due to mining activity. 

 

"You just have to take a loss," said rancher L.J. Turner from near Wright, Mont. "That 6,000 acres we lost supported our family."

 

History also repeats here, though on a different scale.Just south of the Basin in Guernsey, Wyoming, one can see pioneer wagon, oxen and foot-worn ruts from the 1830s Oregon Trail, carved two to six feet deep into sandstone. 

 

Now, for miles to the north into Montana the land is rutted, ripped and stripped by 16 huge open pit coal mines, tracked by railroads carrying the black fuel to power U.S. electricity. And increasingly, it's a landscape punctured by gas and oil wells.

 

Quiet gravel roads

I spent a week this fall roaming the landscape, accompanied by environmental health scientist Joan Rothlein, to see where so much of America’s coal comes from and the source of proposed coal exports. Along the main two-lane highway where huge coal and oil industry semi trucks continuously loom in the rear-view, and out on quiet gravel ranch roads where pronghorn antelope graze, we captured some of the people and work of today’s energy boom.

 

 

Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/