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Lets have a minute of solumn silence for the departed miners and their families My heart goes out to the families of these men in this time of sorrow. Ten people killed in a mine? Sounds bad. How many people are killed on the highways every day? The number runs over 100 people who die in auto accidents per day! The mining disaster at Sago is tragic, but it is made worse by the fact of the news media feeding like a school of piranas. Would they be there filming the minors if they went to work and went home every day without any problems? The answer is NO! Good news does not sell papers. Tragedy sells. I have a degree in Mining Engineering from West Virginia University and have worked in the mines early in my career. Listening to the questions being asked by the media makes me want to laugh or cry. I do not know which to do. The media asks such stupid questions it is freightning. And to think our opinions on world subjects are being formed by the remarks of such idiots. Could the media atleast have a reporter on the scene who has a smattering of technical knowledge? Maybe then they would not seem so stupid most of the time. Enough of my tirade on the media. Lets move on to better subjects. Yes, Applachian coal has superior properties when compared to PRB coal. Unfortunately Applachian coal is high in sulphur, however, power plants in that region routinely place scrubbers on the power plants to remove 99.99% of the pollutants before they are vented to the atmosphere. The power plants are buying one form of energy (coal) and converting it to another (electricity). Newton said it all in that you cannot create energy, you can only change it from one form to another. Assuming that you need 1,000 kw hours of power. If a pound of Applachian coal has 14,520 BTU it would take approximately 1/4 pound of coal to generate this amount of electrical energy. Now lets suppose that we have PRB coal with an energy content of 9,500 BTU per pound. It would take approximately half again as much PRB coal to produce the same amount of electricity. I do not know the current prices of each coal, but the math is easy to work out where the break even point would be when transportation is figured in. Many Applachian power plants have coal mines at the plant entrance. This is called mine to plant type of operation. Except for the cost of a short conveyor belt there are no transportation costs for this arrangement. Just look at what the Class 1s charge to move a ton of coal from the PRB to a power plant. Power plants can be designed to handle any type of fuel. In Texas, Texas Utilities is building power plants that run on lignite, which is a grade lower than sub bituminous. It can be done. Putting the wrong coal into a power plant will not be the most effecient operation going. An oil field example (which is where I make my living) would be the refinery that Getty Oil built near Marcus Hook Pennsylvania. Getty had huge reserves of an undesirable heavy crude in the Neutral Zone of Kuwait. If you ran this crude through a normal refinery the yields of desirable products (read gasoline) would be very poor. Getty purpose built a refinery to handle this heavy crude and obtain good yieds from this crude. The same holds true for power plants. The problem is that the population density (and energy consumption) is in the east. In the PRB area the population is fairly scarce. Not much demand for energy there so it must be shipped. As to safety much has been done over the last 50 years to make a coal mine a safer place to work. True, the severity rate of the mining industry (both soft and hardrock mining) is far higher than any other industry, but strides have been made. There was a time that miners did not even wear hard hats. Now they have loads of safety equipment. Times are improving, however, it is not perfect-yet.
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