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Welcome back. Module seven covers coal. It's the second of five modules on fossil fuels. In this lecture, we'll look at the different forms and uses of coal. So let's get started. All right, now that we've introduced fossil fuels, let's start by talking about coal, one of the historically most important fossil fuels. If we look at the flow of coal in the United States, this is in million shore tons per year, going from the left to right. Again, as before, the fuels are on the left, and the end use is on the right. There are four types of coal we use. Mostly, we use bituminous coal and sub-bituminous coal, two grades of coal. We'll go through all four grades shortly. We also use a little bit of lignite and a tiny bit of anthracite. In total, we use about a billion tons per year that we produce and consume in the United States. We do export some, especially to China. So we export about 10%, about 100 million tons, of our coal to China. And then the rest goes mostly to electric power. It's about 928 million tons per year for electric power. Plus, another 72 million tons or so a year for the steelmaking industry. And then, a little bit for residential and commercial. There are still people who use coal today for water heating and space heating in their boilers and buildings or in their homes in the Northeast. But for the most part, we use two grades of coal, bituminous and sub-bituminous. And we use it mostly for electric power, with a couple other types of grades of coal for a couple other different purposes. This is a pretty simple diagram. We have few sources of coal and few uses for coal. And it's a big fat arrow, which means we use a lot of it. There are four ranks of coal. The four most common ranks of coal are lignite, sub-bituminous, bituminous, and anthracite. Sub-bituminous and bituminous are the most prevalent in the United States and what we use the most of. And we use it mostly for electricity. And that rank is descriptive of the type of coal. It depends on the amount of carbon. The amount of carbon in the coal determines what kind of rank it is. Lower carbon means lower rank. So lignite has less carbon than sub-bituminous, which has less carbon than bituminous, which has less carbon than anthracite. If we look at just the lignite, this is the lowest gray coal. It's about 25% to 35% carbon. It's the youngest coal. It's also known as brown coal. The joke in Texas is that it's really crappy coal, and so if you put enough gasoline on it, it will burn anyway. Which is kind of a funny way to think of coal as a fuel source.

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It has really high moisture content, and it's mainly burned in power plants to generate electricity. In the United States, we produce lignite in places like Texas and North Dakota. Sub-bituminous is the next rank of coal. It's a little higher rank than lignite. It's about 35% to 45% carbon. It's at least 100 million years old. It's got a higher heating value, and it's mostly for electricity and produced in great abundance in Wyoming. Wyoming is a major coal-producing state. Bituminous coal is the next higher grade. It has about 45% to 86% carbon. Greater variability depending on where you produce the coal. Every coal field is different. It's got about two to three times the heat content of lignite, for example. It's the most abundant rank of coal we have in the United States. We have great abundance of it. It's used for electricity and as a raw material for making steel and iron. And it's about 100 to 300 million years old and is produced in the eastern parts of the States, in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and West Virginia. The highest rank of coals, anthracite, which is really high in carbon-- 85% to 97% carbon-- it's a really shiny sort of black metal-looking coal if you've ever seen it. We're basically out of it in the United States. We played out the anthracite mines in Pennsylvania. It is still produced in minor quantities and imported to the US for specialty purposes. And it isn't really used in power plants. It's too expensive and too valuable. The United States has a lot of coal. The United States is a large country with a lot of continental resources. And one of those resources for which we have abundance is coal. According to the National Academy of Sciences, the world's largest-known coal reserves, bigger than any other country, is about 267 billion or so short tons, which is enough to last a couple hundred years at today's level of use. That doesn't mean it'll be cheap for a whole 200 years, because the coal tends to get more expensive as you mine deeper for it. But it is there. We have a lot of it. If you compare the United States to other countries, we have more than Russia, more than China, more than Australia and India and Germany. So we have a lot of coal in the United States. We have a lot of resource. It's a domestic resource for us. It has its merits and drawbacks like every other fuel choice. Coal is good, and coal is bad. The merits of coal is that it's abundant. It's domestic. It's cheap, at least historically. Although, prices have gone up for over a decade. And it's easy to store. You can have a pile of coal outside your power plant. It doesn't

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float away. It just sits there. And that's useful if you are a power plant operator, and you want to make sure you have fuel available, even if there's a supply disruption. There are several drawbacks to coal. It has significant land disturbance for its extraction, especially for surface mining in the mountains. It's very carbon-intensive. And coal is nature's Brita filter, which means coal, over millennia, has been cleaning the water by taking heavy metals and things out of the water. But then, when you burn that coal, it releases heavy metals into the environment, including things like sulfur, mercury, and other things that we just don't want to breathe. So this is one of the challenges of coal, is it's really dirty compared to the other options. Coal has price advantages as well. It is less expensive historically and less volatile than oil and gas. If you look at the prices over the last few decades for the different fuels in terms of dollars per million BTU, crude oil is the most expensive and the most volatile, going up and down and at a very high level today. Natural gas has gone up and down, kind of like petroleum has gone up and down, although natural gas is separate in price and is cheaper today. But natural gas is still more expensive than coal. Coal is less expensive and has less volatility. It did have a price increase in the '70s, but it's been mostly flat since then. Though, for the last decade or so, it's been inching up in price over time. If you are an energy decision maker, and you're about to spend several billion dollars on an asset that will last 40 years, the low volatility in coal price is an advantage, because you can expect what your fuel price will be, and you can make better economic decisions about the lifetime of that plant. So for power plant operators, knowing that the price of coal will probably be cheap for the next 40 years is useful. Whereas, with natural gas, the power plants are easy to build, but you don't know what the natural gas price will be. So that price stability of coal is very valuable. If we look historically at the United States, coal consumption and production have been closely matched. We basically produce about as much as we consume. Which means, we don't import coal. We don't have a national security problem with coal. We have a security problem with energy imports of other forms, namely petroleum. But we do not have that problem with coal. In fact, we export coal. And our exports to China have been growing significantly in the last few years, for example. As we've used coal, as it's grown more popular, it's primarily been for the electric power sector. We used to use much more coal in the industrial sector for metal making. And then, we also used in our homes and buildings for heating. We even used some for transportation, like for old steam-driven

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trains. But those uses have dropped in time. And particular, in steelmaking, we've gone more towards recycled steel. And recycled steel uses electricity or other sources rather than coal. So those uses have dropped, but the use of coal for power has increased, because it's been reliable, affordable, available. And so we've liked that for our power plants. You might notice the last few years, however, coal use for power generation has dropped some. And that's because it's lost market share to natural gas or because of the recession, which has decreased energy demand overall. There are two types of mining for coal, surface mining and underground mining. Surface mining is shown on the right side of the figure, and underground mining on the left side. If we start with the underground mining, this is more familiar, at least when people think about mines, going underground, having a pillar and boom system where you drill from left to right like this drift mine that's shown there. And you have equipment chewing up the rock and spitting out the coal out the side of the mountain. You might have a slope mine, which means the same kind of concept, but you actually have to go downhill first. You have to go a little deeper, which means you spend more energy or more money to get that coal out. Or you have a shaft mine, where you use elevators that might go thousands of feet below ground. You have one elevator to take the miners, another elevator to bring the coal up and down. And that's even more energy intensive, because you have to spend the energy to lift the people and coal up and down. All underground methods there's very little disturbance on the surface from this mining method. Maybe a mine shaft, maybe an elevator shaft, maybe an opening to the mine, but not much surface disturbance. So that's an advantage of underground mining. However, it is dangerous underground. There is always risk of cave-ins or collapse. So you're trading off environmental impact for public safety or for miner safety. On the right hand side of the figure are the surface mining methods. And because they're disturbing the surface by virtue how they mine, they are more impactful topographically. You can cut away the mountain at the side to pull the coal out. You have a pile of rocks beside you when you're done that you have to replace. You can reclaim them out by putting that back later, but it's never quite the same. You can cut away the side of the mountain, see to get the coal beds by doing a contour bench, or you can actually remove the mountaintop.

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So there's basically two ways to mine coal. You can remove the coal from the mountain, or remove the mountain from the coal. And surface mining is the latter, removing the mountain from the coal. The impact is quite severe. You can see mountaintop removal mining from space or from planes as you're flying. If you look out at West Virginia, you'll see the disturbance to the mountains. The hills all of a sudden get leveled and flat-topped. And it's very topographically impactful. The advantage, however, in surface mining is it's safer. There's less risk to the miners and the workers, and it's cheaper historically. So we're trading off between safety and price versus environmental impact of the underground mining. Another form of surface mining. If we look at just the surface, could be in the flats off to the far right of the diagram. You could have large fields or prairies where you remove a few feet of overburden, take the coal out, put the grass and dirt back, and you'll never notice it was a mine. There are surface mines you could walk on that you think it's just a field or a prairie, because it doesn't have topography that's very complicated to replace. It's just a big flat area. And that's similar to some of the surface mines in Texas and in the Western part of the United States. If we look overall, most coal in the United States is produced by surface mining, more than half. We have a couple million tons each year produced in underground mines, and well over half a billion tons produced in surface mines. And those surface mines are made up of mountaintop removal mining in the East and, in the flat surface, more valleys and prairies mining in the West. This shift from east to west occurred starting in the 1970s for environmental reasons. There's was a push starting in the '70s to clean up our air quality. The environmental movement was born at the very late '60s, early '70s. And the desire to clean up our air came with a desire to remove the sulfur from coal. One way to remove the sulfur from coal is to use a low-sulfur coal, coal that naturally has less sulfur. And the Western coal has lower sulfur compare to the Eastern coal. So one way to clean up the sulfur is to scrub your power plant after you burn the coal, or another way is just put cleaner coal in in the first place. And for the most part, we went to the Western, cleaner, lowsulfur coal as a way to accomplish that environmental role. So there's was a sudden growth starting in the '70s of Western coal, west of the Mississippi. Coal production in places like Wyoming. And that was done through surface mining, which is one reason why surface mining grew. And so now, Western coal is producing greater abundance than Eastern coal. I encourage you to do the online exercises to reinforce what we learned in this module. I look forward to

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seeing you at the next lecture.

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