The Oil Drum

If you use Google Earth to look down on the village of Eglingham in Northumberland (thought they put it in Cumbria), (location 55deg28’13 N 1deg 49’38.43W at a height of 2.23 km - picture below the fold) you would rightly think that you are looking at a one of the more beautiful parts of the UK. And it was here that is as far back as my family history takes me, since back around 1700 my family lived in the street the ruins of which are now covered with gorse and moorland at the top of the lane that runs up from the bottom of the picture to the top. There are, as it happens, at least two mines whose remnants lie within the picture, and the family worked in one of them.

The National Research Council, as Leanan reported earlier, has just issued a report Coal: Research and Development to Support National Energy Policy dealing with both current reserves and needed research. While I haven’t had a chance to read it in detail yet, there was one paragraph I thought worth mentioning before I write a longer review, and it is this one.

Despite significant uncertainties in existing reserve estimates, it is clear that there is sufficient coal at current levels of production to meet anticipated needs through 2030. Looking further into the future, there is probably sufficient coal to meet the nation’s needs for more than 100 years at current rates of consumption. However it is not possible to confirm the often-quoted assertion that there is a sufficient supply of coal for the next 250 years.

I had written in the non-too-distant past about why coal reserves can be smaller than those anticipated. There is, however, a current part of the in-situ deposits that are not considered, and to illustrate what I mean, I thought I would use the example of the Prairie State Energy Campus that is being developed in Southern Illinois. This is a 1,600 megawatt power plant that will serve customers in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana and Kentucky. It will be served by a dedicated adjacent underground coal mine. It is one aspect of this mine that I thought I would address here.

This is the start of a new semester and so it is time to begin the weekend Techie talks again. However this time I am going to try creating the occasional picture, rather than just referring to other sites, in the hope that this might be more useful. Some of these will come from 3-D models that I am building to make the illustrations, so if there are some questions or other views that might help, ask and I may be able to generate a different picture.

For the first couple of talks I want to go back and revisit coal mining. Both the Washington Post and the NYT have stories recently about coal mining and the people who work there. I remember once being in a class that was discussing D.H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers" and the portrait of mining that it presented. It did not correlate well with my memories of being in a mine, which was often much warmer and drier than it has been described.

And so I thought that, today, I would try and create some simple illustrations of some aspects of what coal mining is all about. I am going to do this in two parts, because there are two distinct ways of mining the coal. One is called Room and Pillar, and that is this week, and the other is Longwall and that will be the next topic.