Technical Topic Paper Coal

8/6/2019 Technical Topic Paper Coal

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Coal and the Human Race:

Where We Began, and Where We Are

Now

By: Caroline LaFave

April 13th, 2011


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Summary

Coal has been in used for about the same amount of time as humans have walked

the earth. It has been used for everything from beautiful jewelry, to simple heating

and forging, to steam powered motors, to electricity. Our world today would not be

what it is if it were not for the plentiful reserves of coal that the human race has

found scattered across the globe. Unfortunately, although coal had always been so

plentiful in the past that it seemed ridiculous to worry about running out, the world

supply is running closer and closer to uncomfortably low in recent years. We, as

humans, need to work together to either find a solution to this problem, or to find a

way to live in which a coal shortage would no longer be a problem.


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Since the very beginning, coal and human kind have been together. Coal has

been used for heating since the time of the caveman, and theres even evidence from

the second and third centuries (100-200 A.D.) that the Romans used it in England.

According to Barbara Freese in her book, Coal: A Human History, the Romans called

coal the best stone in Britain. Initially, it was given this title because, when

polished, they could make the most beautiful jewelry out of it. It wasnt until later

that the Romans discovered that coal was actually able to burn. After that, soldiers

burned coal in their forts, blacksmiths burned coal in their furnaces, and priests

honored Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, by burning coal in the perpetual fire at

her shrine in Bath (Freese, 2003). St. Bede the Venerable, a man who wrote a

history of England after the departure of the Romans, noted that the use of coal

simply died out once they left. If coal was used at all during this time period, it

wasnt for its heat, but for its protective smoke, which drove off snakes.

In North America, coal was first used back in the 1300s by the Hopi Indians

in the Southwest. Among the Native American people, coal use was specific to the

Hopi, who used it for heating, cooking, and firing pottery, as well as making black

pigment, and a bed for the paving stones on the floors of their kiva (a large

underground or partly underground room in a Pueblo Indian village, used chiefly for

religious ceremonies). In order to get the coal they needed, the Indians developed

methods of strip mining and underground mining. According to Trudy Griffin-Pierce

in her book entitled Native Peoples of the Southwest, they removed approximately

450 pounds a day during the 300 years of Hopi coal mining at Awatovi (2000).

However, around the time of the arrival of the Spaniards, the easily mined coal


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supply had dwindled, and European tools made gathering wood much easier. Coal

use in America ceased from that point until much later, when it was rediscovered in

the United States by explorers in 1673 (DOE, 2011). This discovery was first

recorded in a map of the Illinois River made by Father Jacques Marquette and Louis

Joliet in 1673-74. They called these coal deposits charbon de terra, which literally

translates into carbon of earth, or coal (NETL, 2011). However, profit-making

coalmining operations didnt start in America until the late 1740s, in an area of

Virginia that had initially been used as hunting grounds by the Cherokee and

Shawnee tribes Green Briar County. However, the use of coal was not very widely

spread until the time of the Industrial Revolution, during which the invention of

machines that ran on coal largely expanded its use. One invention in particular that

begs mentioning is the steam engine, invented by James Watt. This innovative

machine made it possible for machines to do the grunt work that was initially done

by humans and their animals (DOE, 2011).

Burning coal in order to generate electricity is a relatively new concept in

humanitys long history of fossil fuel use. It wasnt until the late nineteenth century

that coal was first burned to generate power for factories and homes. Now, we use a

lot of coal, mainly because we have access to large, known supplies of it, right here

in the United States. Coal has always been our primary source of the steam used to

make electricity, for several reasons. First and foremost, coal is abundant. It is found

all over the country and it is easy to get to (Figure 1). In many places it can be mined

right from the surface. In other places the miners go underground to get it. Because

coal is abundant and easy to get to, it is very cheap. It is also easy to transport and


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store, compared to other fuels. So, it everything that depends on electricity depends

mostly on coal (Figure 2); in fact, 41% of the worlds electricity is generated through

coal (Coal & Electricity, 2008). Modern life is unimaginable without electricity. It

lights houses, buildings, streets, provides domestic and industrial heat, and powers

most equipment used in homes, offices, and machinery in factories (Coal &

Electricity). While some of this electricity may come from power plants that use

nuclear power, some gas and oil, and even some wind and water power, most of it

comes from coal one billion tons a yeas, or more. Every one of us uses almost four

tons a year (Coal and Electric Power, 1998).

In order to take coal and turn it into electricity, we use a process called

pulverized coal combustion (PCC), in which coal is ground into a fine power, blown

into the combustion chamber of a boiler, and burnt at a high temperature (Figure 3).

The heat and energy produced changes water (in tubes around the boiler) into high-

pressure steam, which then pushes at thousands of propeller-like blades in a

turbine, causing it to spin. At the other end of the turbine is a generator that

contains tightly wound coils of wire which, when spun in a strong magnetic field,

generate electricity. The electricity generated is then transformed into up to

400,000 volts (Coal & Electricity, 2011).

One of the newer, more environmentally friendly ways to use coal to create

electricity is called Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC). In this process,

you basically partially burn coal in order to create gas, which can lower emissions

and produce less solid waste (Figure 4). Using the IGCC method, more of the power

comes from the gas turbine than it does from the traditional steam turbine. In fact,


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60-70% of the power comes from the gas turbine (Integrated Gasification

Combined Cycle: The Future?, 2011).

Based on this information, it seems to me that the human race is pretty coal-

dependent. Coal use has pretty much coincided with the existence of modern man,

and we, as a nation and a world, wouldnt have gotten to where we are to day if it

werent for this hard, black, carbon-filled substance that supplies us with all of our

cheap power. Unfortunately for us, who are so dependent on it, coal, like all other

fossil fuels, is a finite resource that will not last forever and ever into the future; not

to mention how much it dirties up our planet with emissions, even with improving

technologies. Coal is not clean.

Also, the six largest coal nations are the United States, Russia, China, India,

Australia, and South Africa. Together they control about eighty-five percent of the

entire worlds coal reserves and about eighty percent of the entire worlds coal

production. Unfortunately for us, these countries and their coal production are in

decline! Coal reserves have been continuously downgraded, in spite of the increase

in coal prices and the introduction of new, more efficient technologies. Most of the

easily obtained coal is gone, and mining at huge depths is more costly, complicated,

and energy consuming. Eventually, we may lose more energy mining coal than we

gain from the coal itself. Somewhere in the 2030s, we will reach the world peak of

coal. We can no longer say that we dont need to worry because the world will have

coal for hundreds of years to come (

One of the biggest and scariest questions this presents, in my mind, is: since

coal wont be around for ever, how much of our lifestyle will we have to give up once


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coal is no longer an option? The idea of returning to the pre-machine age is

terrifying, especially since (what with all of the technology that has been developed

using coal as the energy source) our population has been able to increase to

numbers that the world never would have been able to support back then. We are

too many people, living way too spread out, depending way too much on food

supplies that are way too dependent on fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we, as a species,

are just like a virus that is way too viral. We have infected this planet (our host) and

the more we thrive, the closer we get to killing it, and thereby killing ourselves. Also,

we cant just stop burning coal we are way to dependent on it. We have no capacity

to spare and most of what we have is coal-fired. So we have to burn coal to have

electricity. In the end, it basically comes down to: are we going to be far-sighted,

think about the future of all humanity, and slowly end our dependency on coal, or

are we going to ignore the future and keep our standard of life, as individuals, the

way it is now? And if we are going to end our dependency on coal, how are we going

to do it? This last question poses a bit of a dilemma in which we have make the

choice. We have to either give up unnecessary commodities (like air conditioning

and home appliances) in order to reduce our dependence on electricity (and

therefore coal), or we can continue to live life that way we do now, and run head-

long into a world catastrophe caused by the sudden end to electricity production,

and our entire way of life is destroyed. Most of us in the modern world have

probably never had to find a way to survive, permanently in nature there has

always been grocery stores that contain food grown with fossil fuels, hospitals that

run on electricity, and transportation dependent on fossil fuels.


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The shortsightedness of our species will be the downfall of us all we were

much too dependent on coal before we realized that it wouldnt be around forever.

Now, we have to slowly rid ourselves of this dependency on coal, just as any drug

addict would have to do if they wanted to survive. The withdrawal symptoms an

entire planet full of humans will certainly be terrible, but unless we want to end up

scrounging for the smallest amount of coal and paying ridiculous amount of money

for afixof electricity, the human race needs to be put on rehab, and fast.


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Figure One

Figure Two


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Figure Three

Figure Four


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Freese, Barbara. Coal: a Human History. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Pub., 2003. Print.

Griffin-Pierce, Trudy. Native Peoples of the Southwest. Albuquerque: University of

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