When I was a little boy in Germany, Christmas season was associated with a certain level of anxiety. Grownups told us that if we didn’t behave, Sankt Rupprecht and/or Sankt Nikolaus would leave a lump of coal in our shoes, instead of sweet goodies (we used shoes, not stockings, and the shoes had to be polished). I never got a lump of coal back then, so I’m guessing my bad behavior still did not surpass a certain threshold. It was not until 2019 that I finally got my lump of coal, not in my shoe, or for my bad behavior, but from a coal mine in Appalachia. It is my Found Object for this essay.
This single lump of coal is representative of the millions of tons mined annually, and reveals a lot about its origin and composition. Its blackness speaks of its organic origin, for it is 85% carbon. Its visible layers tell of its origin from compressed layers of plant material, and the whitish coating in the fissure planes was once sulfur containing constituents of these plants.
Coal has been known since ancient times as the Rock That Burns. Indeed, thousands of coal fires, both natural and man-made are burning around the world all the time. Some have been burning for thousands of years. If you were to visit the Escalante region in southern Utah, you could stand on ground heated by coal burning deep beneath your feet, releasing occasional telltale wisps of smoke. Until the Industrial Revolution, coal was mostly gathered from surface exposures but when demand for fuel for steam engines increased, it began to be mined in earnest. So great was the demand that the “easy” coal was soon exhausted, requiring underground mining. Coal has been the world’s most important fossil fuel ever since, and its use has only recently been challenged and reduced.
Coal starts as peat of one sort or another. Because there are huge amounts of peat in the world, we can ask if given enough time and the right conditions, “our” peat would become the coal of the future. Perhaps sadly, this is less likely than it was 250 to 320 million years ago in the Carboniferous and early Permian periods. Whereas important, younger coal deposits exist, 90% of the world’s coal was formed during the Carboniferous (hence the name) and early Permian time, suggesting that conditions were very special and different from what they have been since then.
What might these conditions have been? Fossils reveal that there were colossal forests of tree ferns and giant club mosses up to 40 meters tall, spore-bearing trees whose cellulose was stabilized by high lignin content. Their remains accumulated as thick deposits of waterlogged peat, decaying little, perhaps in part because the fungi that nowadays degrade lignin had not yet evolved. Primitive reptiles roamed the forests, but there were not yet any seed plants, birds or mammals. There was only one continent, Pangaea, formed when Gondwanaland crashed into Laurasia, raising an enormous mountain range that stretched the length of the equatorial region, its runoff creating huge wetlands of the dense forests whose remains were destined to become the coal we mine today.
The enormous oxygen-producing forests raised the oxygen level of the atmosphere to 30%, allowing insects to become huge, and supporting intense wildfires that turned even green vegetation into charcoal. So much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere was stored in peat that the climate cooled. At the same time, the weathering of the huge, equatorial mountain ranges consumed still more atmospheric carbon dioxide until huge ice caps covered the southern regions and earned the Carboniferous/early Permian eras the name Icehouse Earth. The fate of much of this colossal amount of accumulated carbon in peat was to be buried under sediments, subjected to heat and pressure and thus to be converted into the coal we mine today. What a place it must have been! There is nothing like it on Earth today.
Once peat deposits have been buried under sediments, they slowly become converted to coal in stages that are reflected in commercial value and caloric content. As temperature increases from about 35o C to 80o C, the peat loses water, methane, carbon dioxide and pore space, and its carbon content increases from about 50% in peat to about 85% in bituminous coal. Pressure and time of burial play a lesser role in this conversion process. Temperatures of at least 180 to 245° C result in anthracite coal, a hard, shiny coal with glassy, conchoidal fractures, used for metal smelting, home heating, and coking, and commanding the highest price.
In contrast to the Paleozoic Icehouse Earth, we live in Hothouse Earth in which rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels lead to warming. Like a large withdrawal from a bank account, our era burns coal to use its stored sunshine, thereby releasing that Paleozoic carbon dioxide and warming the climate. Even so, not all that release is man-made. As noted above, thousands of coal fires, ignited by lightning, forest fires, spontaneous combustion and humans are burning around the world in exposed coal seams and underground mines, liberating millions more tons of Paleozoic carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Add to that the carbon dioxide released by more frequent and larger wildfires in a warmer, drier climate, and the oxidation of temperate and tropical peat deposits, and, in the words of a famous movie, “Houston, we have a problem.”
In the USA, coal deposits are especially extensive in the Appalachian Regions, the Cumberland Plateaus, and the western states of Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. Like many other resource extraction economies, eastern coal mining has a dramatic, conflicted, and exploitative history. As in England and other European countries, the struggle between mine owners/operators and miners was intense and often violent. With the development of huge strip mines that require gigantic machines but little human labor, most of the 12,000 underground coal mines in the Appalachian region have pretty much died. Thousands of abandoned mines are testimony to the former importance of this industry, and its legacy remains in dying towns and endemic poverty, as well as toxic water leaking from abandoned mines.
On a car trip through the Cumberland Plateau of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, we came upon Barthell, a so-called coal camp that is preserved as a museum by the son of one of the last miners. Today, the camp is reachable by a very narrow winding, seven-mile road hugging the steep slopes of a river valley, but when the camp was built, the only connection to the nearest town of Stearns, KY was the railroad that hauled out the coal. The camp was a largely isolated company town belonging to Stearns Coal and Lumber Company. Production began in 1903, peaking in the Depression Years and ending in the early 50s. This and many of the other mines in this area were small in comparison with the still-active Bailey Complex Mine in West Virginia whose underground area is now four times as large as the District of Columbia and growing.
Workers lived in company housing, bought their supplies in company stores, were served by company doctors and dentists, attended church and school in company buildings. Chances are that, like many other company towns, the miners were probably paid in script rather than money, and were eternally in debt (in the words of the song, Sixteen Tons, “St. Peter don’t you call me, ‘cause I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store.”). In the years before a road paralleled the rail line, miners could visit the town of Stearns cross-country on foot or on occasional weekend trains to town.
Much of the camp has been preserved or restored--- the company store, the school/meeting room, doctor/dentist office, workshop and some of the remaining workers’ houses, some of which you can now book for overnight stays. Although the Stearns Company limited the lives of the miners in many ways, the capital investment in the camp was considerable. These were not shabby, minimal buildings, despite the early relative isolation of the camp.
For most of its existence, the company operated two mines, one of which can be visited, but not very far into it, for the ceiling has collapsed about a hundred yards in from the entrance. The tunnel exposes the coal seam which, like many of Appalachian coal seams, is not very thick. In underground coal mining, the tunnels from which coal is mined are usually only as high as the coal seam is thick. After all, it costs real money to carve out tunnels that accommodate standing men, coal carts, ponies, locomotives and so on, so a great deal of the mining was performed by crouching or crawling miners.
My impression of what underground coal mining must have been like for most of its existence comes from our father’s experience at the end of WW2. He was taken prisoner of war by the Americans, and along with thousands of other German POWs, was farmed out as war reparations labor to a Belgian coal mine. If you want to know what coal mining has probably been like for most of its history, here are our father’s own words.
Into the Pit
One evening a group of us, about 50 men, were marched to the mine. This meant I had been assigned to a night shift. I recall vividly my first view of the miners coming up from the preceding shift, all black with coal dust, only the whites of the eyes glimmering, shouting to each other, "Tap dessus" (Hit it), the miners of our shift squatting on their heels, an electric lamp before them. I soon learned that squatting on the heels was customary--- sitting with outstretched legs was forbidden in the mine, because falling rocks might crush your legs. We were handed lamps, but no helmets as the miners had. We had only our military caps. Later we fashioned thickly cushioned caps from some rags. About 10 men were stuffed into a sort of elevator cage of steel rods and down we sank for about 1,000 meters. We were unloaded into a tunnel, high enough to stand up, with rails along which miners pushed carts filled with coal. I belonged to a small group of 4 POW’s, headed by two Flemish boys, the older one called François. I knew enough French to be able to talk with him. Our task was the transport of lumber pieces of about 3 ft in length, 6" in diameter, which served to support the ceiling of the very low coal seams. The standup tunnels served the rail transport and were costly to excavate in the rock. The crawling tunnels simply followed the low thickness of the coal seams and were formed by the gradual removal of the coal. All our work had to be done crawling on all fours. One threw the lumber pieces ahead as far as possible, then crawled over the pile, threw the pile ahead piece by piece once more, and so on until one arrived at the destination, which was usually a group of miners working on the coal seam with compressed air hammers. What cruel work this was! One could barely see for coal dust and the men had no dust masks. They were certainly destined for "black lung" disease. I thought my crawling toil was preferable. We had been given sturdy blue denim overalls that could tolerate the crawling. The various levels of seams were connected by steel chutes of such a width that a man could lie in it like in a coffin. The ceiling of the rock above the chutes was only about 10" high. These chutes served to slide lumber to the next lower level. At the end of the shift, signaled by a clanging against the chutes, the miners would lie down in the chutes, feet first and slide from level to level, to the lowest level where the elevator started. This was at first a fearful step, but soon it became fun. It was, after all, the end of eight hours of toil. Raised back to the surface, we were able to change clothes, had access to shower stalls with plenty of hot water and enough soap. Only around the eyes one was not able to apply soap because of the irritation. So it was that all POWs working in the pit had black-rimmed eyes that distinguished them from the "potato peelers". At dawn we marched back to the camp, dragging along, very tired. At the camp we got coffee and our food ration and then attempted to sleep while those on the day shift stirred about.
I soon came became convinced that coal mining, at least under the conditions of this old mine, was the worst toil that man had to endure.
It seems likely that the work of the miners in the Barthell Coal Camp was generally similar, although they were not forced labor as our father was. Most of the Belgian coal mines, including the one where my father labored have closed. When their pumps were turned off, the mines filled with water, becoming favorite sites for recreational cave divers. As the divers now glide through the clear water of the flooded mines, I wonder if they have any inkling of the misery that these mines were once party to.
Our life intersected with coal again on a car trip to the short-grass prairies of the Nebraska Sandhills. We had not expected that the town of Alliance, Nebraska would be a major rail hub, with an enormous rail yard that assembled “unit coal trains” to move coal from the Powder River Basin of Wyoming to power plants in the central, eastern, and southern USA. From an overpass, we watched BNSF diesel locomotives move coal cars onto the main line then back onto one of the 12 sidings to couple more cars until the assembly of each unit train was complete .
It took less than an hour to assemble a unit train one to one-and-a-half miles long, with 100 to 140 cars, each loaded with 20 tons of coal. Four more locomotives with their partly assembled trains patiently waited for their turn, while engine-less trains waited to be coupled. Unit trains departed on the main line through Alliance every hour or two, heading eastward for some power plant where the 20-tons of coal in each car would be dumped into a hopper by a machine that turned the entire car upside down and placed it back on its track. A small fraction of this coal is exported.
What we were witnessing in Alliance was the reality of the increasing dominance of western strip mining over eastern underground and mountaintop removal mining. By 2003, the Powder River Basin yielded more coal than the eastern Appalachian coal basins combined. This dominance resulted from a combination of geology, economics and politics. Despite the lower quality of Wyoming coal (60% of the heat content of Appalachian coal) its much lower sulfur content allowed older power plants to meet the standards of the Clean Air Act . In addition, the cost and efficiency of mining and transporting strongly favor western sources. For comparison, Appalachian coal mines employ 56% of the miners in the USA and produce 24% of the coal. Western strip mines, especially in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, employ 10% of the miners and produce 45% of the coal from only 16 mines— about 250 million tons in 2021 when Appalachia produced about 160 million tons from 620 mines.
Western strip mining is also far more efficient than Appalachian mining. In Appalachia, production is about 7 tons per man-hour, but in Wyoming it is 39 tons. An average underground miner in West Virginia produces about 3 tons of coal per hour, whereas the average strip miner in Wyoming produces 28. In 2020, not surprisingly, Appalachian coal averaged $66 per ton, while western coal averaged $29, with Wyoming coal selling for only $13 per ton. No wonder the unit train traffic through Alliance was so heavy!
Geology blessed western strip mining with still more favors. Whereas coal seams are five to thirteen feet thick in Appalachia, in the Powder River Basin they average 60 to 70 feet thick. This coal is much younger than the Paleozoic coal of most of the world, having been formed during the Cretaceous and Paleocene Periods 50 to 70 million years ago during the advance and retreat of a huge inland sea.
There is something mystical about using sunshine stored tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, ancient sunshine whose energy has contributed enormously to human well-being by reducing hunger and misery, providing warmth and light, and increasing material well-being and health. In the anxiety and passion of the current discussion of climate change, blame often settles on fossil fuels, while generally failing to acknowledge the astounding associated human progress, as well as the benefits to most of us personally. It remains to be seen whether we can be grateful as we try to reduce the negative consequences of these enormous gifts from ancient times.
I enjoyed reading the blend between science and history in this essay. I recently read a brief history of the largest gold mine in Alaska, Treadwell Gold, also a company town but perhaps not quite as exploitative. The mining was hard work too, but they had larger tunnels because they brought up all the rock to be stamped above ground, because of how the gold was embedded in the quartz. I thought the picture of the thick coal seam was fascinating, and interesting how it produces a different type of mining technique.
...and tens of millions of new stories are being written today in Ukraine