May 1, 2009 · West Virginians have been mining coal for 120 years. There's still a lot left--but it might not be accessible through surface mining.Last month there was a story about the controversy over mountaintop removal in the State Journal, where Congressman Nick Rahall said that the state’s most productive coal seams likely will be exhausted in 20 years.
It turns out, the answer depends on whether you’re talking about underground mines, or surface mines.
According to 2007 estimates from the Energy Information Administration, there are about 18 billion tons of recoverable reserves in West Virginia. That’s a lot, especially considering in 1997—the state’s record production year—about 182 million tons of coal were mined.
But the same statistics paint a dire picture for the state’s surface mining. Surface mine production has been increasing, but the amount of coal that can be reached by that method is small and getting smaller.
West Virginia has always produced more coal by underground methods than by surface mining, but over the years, the amount of surface-mined coal is steadily rising, while underground coal production is steadily falling.
In 1994, underground mines produced more than 61 million more tons of coal than surface mines did. By 2007, there the difference between the two had narrowed to about 16 million tons (see attached PDF).
So operators are mining almost as much coal from surface mines as underground mines in West Virginia -- but it turns out there’s relatively little coal that can be mined that way.
According to the Energy Information Administration, there are a bit more than 2 billion tons of coal reserves that you can recover from surface mining. There are 15 billion in underground mining.
That same government data shows that about 50 million tons of coal is being surface mined each year in West Virginia. Those numbers alone suggest there are about 43 years of surface mining left in West Virginia, compared to 165 years of recoverable reserves through underground mining.
There are many assumptions in that calculation however, most of which may not prove to be true. This assumes that operators recover the coal at the same rate every year as we have in recent years.
Fred Freme is a coal industry statistician with the Energy Information Administration. He says there are a variety of factors that actually change the economically recoverable reserves.
“Not only the changes in technology, the changes in the coal prices, because as the price increases it’s more economical to mine the center seams,” he said.
So these numbers assume that we don’t make any huge technological breakthroughs in coal mining, which would allow us to get at smaller coal seams that aren’t recoverable right now.
There are coal resources in the mountains of West Virginia, but only a percentage of those are available for development. If all of the coal in West Virginia is a pie, a large slice of the pie is coal that operators can’t get to. Some of that coal is already gone—it’s been mined in the past. Sometimes land restrictions make it impossible to get the coal—you can’t mine under a town or a state park, for example.
Another section of the pie is recoverable coal reserves. This is all the coal that is potentially mine-able in the future, and what the previous statistics are based on.
But coal mining is a business and company owners need to ensure that their mines turn a profit. The smallest slice of the coal pie is the economically recoverable coal reserves, and that slice represents the coal that is in the ground, can be mined, and will make a mining company money.
It all depends on the price and demand of coal. If the price is high, companies will be willing to move more rock to get to less coal.
“You’ve also got the fact that excluding recessionary years, if you want to call them that, consumption has constantly been increasing every year,” Freme said. “So to take into account the ‘number of years’ you’re going to have to have some kind of assumption as to the annual increase in consumption of coal.”
If the demand for coal goes down –because of federal regulations or because of renewable energy developments – then there will be more years of surface mining left. But the current trend has been to depend more and more on production from surface mines.
Between 2004 and 2007, according to EIA statistics, the mining industry only managed to deplete the state’s underground mine reserves by less than 2%. During the same time period, the surface mine reserves were diminished by more than 6%.
“I think if you talked to different representatives of the industry in West Virginia or the major players, there are only a limited number of true mountaintop removal mining sites left in West Virginia,” said John Morgan, a coal consultant and the president of Morgan Worldwide.
“And by that I mean 2000-acre size mines, which is removing all the coal seams from outcrop to outcrop. There just aren’t that many of those sites left.”
In recent years, the overburden has also gotten larger, which means that mountaintop removal mines are disturbing ever-larger areas to get at the same amount of coal.
“I think we have to make decisions based on the most efficient type of mining which we want to utilize,” Morgan said. “And because the resources are becoming depleted—that’s a function of any mining operation, you’re depleting a natural resource—that you have to make sure those impacts are minimized and we’re getting the most out of the disturbance.
“So we need to be looking at the mines that are giving the largest amount of coal for the area we’re disturbing and the mines that are creating the least impacts to offsite, such as stream impacts or impacts to communities, so those have to be part of the equation.”
In a way, Morgan says it could be good news for workers in West Virginia.
“Because the type of deposit which is suitable for large surface mining equipment at low ratio is gone or will be gone, the same way that some of the more accessible underground mines which are thicker and closer to the surface will probably be depleted,” he said.
“So the remaining reserves are going to be less productively mined. Therefore the tons per manshift will be decreasing. You’re going to have more people working in the mining industry to get the same amount of coal.”
No, but Morgan stressed that we need to concentrate on training younger workers to work in underground mines, because that’s where the jobs will be.
“Fundamentally there’s going to be a mining industry in West Virginia for a significant period of time,” he said.
“Most of it is going to be underground and I think we need to start thinking about technology and how do we recover those underground reserves, particularly if we’re going to have a workforce that doesn’t necessarily want to work underground and if we don’t educate future employees as to the benefits of the mining industry, it’s going to face a double challenge: one of more difficult reserves and second, of a workforce that isn’t as motivated to work in those mines.”
Representatives from the West Virginia Coal Association were unavailable for comment.
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