Coal: Dig It Up, Move It, Burn It
Wyoming's Powder River Basin
Second in the "Energy
and Where They Get It" series of articles on the major energy sites in
the United States.
An endless conveyor of coal trains moves
Wyoming away to be vaporized in the furnaces of the Midwest.
CLUI photo
As the perpetually smouldering landscapes of
former coal towns like Centralia Pennsylvania attest, coal, a
natural rock that exists in large quantities in the ground, burns,
almost by itself. With a fuel that is this easy it is not surprising
then that most electricity in this country is produced by burning
coal.
Though mining coal in tunnels under southern landscapes continues,
large scale coal production has opened up and moved west. Now,
more coal comes from one place than any other single area: the
Wyodak coal seam in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming. In this
treeless rolling landscape, in a region less than 70 miles long,
around 2,600 people work in eight major mines, pulling a third
of the coal that is consumed by the nation's power plants from
the ground.
In 2003, Wyoming’s mass decreased by 432,000,000 tons,
from coal that was extracted, shipped, then burned in the Midwest
and south. This is more than the amount of coal produced by the
two next largest coal states, West Virginia and Kentucky, combined,
and more than half the total amount produced in the USA.
Black Thunder: maybe the World's largest
mining operation.
CLUI Photo
The rich swamplands that covered the region 75
million years ago formed beds of coal, now buried by a hundred
feet or so of soil and rock. In the Wyodak bed (named for its
presence in Wyoming and proximity to the Dakotas), this layer
of coal ranges from 25 to 190 feet in thickness. The process of
extracting it is relatively simple: employ large rolling shovel
machines and drag lines (large clawed buckets moved around by
cables and a crane) to remove the topsoil and overburden, and
put it aside. Next blast the black coal bed with explosives to
loosen it, and then scoop it up into massive haul trucks, and
put it on a train.
In the Southern Powder River Basin two adjacent operations compete
for the title of largest coal mine in the nation, the North Antelope
Rochelle Complex, owned by Peabody Energy, and the Black Thunder
Coal Mine. With operations all over the world, Peabody Energy,
based in St. Louis, is the largest coal company in the world.
It operates three mines in the Powder River Basin, but the North
Antelope Rochelle is by far the largest, producing over 80 million
tons per year.
A few miles away, the Black Thunder Mine is owned by the Arch
Coal Company, the nation’s second largest coal company,
also headquartered in St. Louis. The mine has operated since 1977,
and was the undisputed largest operation in the country until
it was surpassed by Peabody’s mine several years ago. But
in 2004, Arch Coal bought the nearby North Rochelle mine from
Triton Coal and added it to the Black Thunder Mine Complex. With
a combined output of over 90 million tons per year, this reestablishes
Black Thunder’s claim as the largest coal mine in the nation,
and quite probably the world.
The scale of everything at Black Thunder is terrestrial and geologic.
Its fleet of five draglines includes Ursa Major, a Bucyrus-Erie
(B-E) 2570WS model, the third largest dragline in the nation.
When it comes to machines this large, often only one of each model
is ever made. They are assembled on site and never leave. In addition
to the draglines are 11 giant electric shovels, dozens of 200
ton plus capacity dump trucks, and two towering storage silos,
each with a 12,700 ton capacity.
Abandoned parking lot at Coal Creek, another
Arch Coal property currently on care-and-maintenance. Once the
coal bed is gone, the mines move on.
CLUI photo
More than two tons of coal is produced
at the Black Thunder mine every second, 24 hours per day, seven
days a week, 365 days a year. This is an amount of energy equivalent
to a 600,000 barrel-per-day oil field, and enough to power over
5 million typical American homes.
But getting the coal out of the ground is just a part of this
monolithically simple economic structure. As much as 80% of the
cost of coal is conveyance: getting it to where it needs to go.
At Black Thunder, if you could pick up the extracted coal at the
mine yourself, it would cost just $5 a ton. In Illinois, electrical
utilities buy the same coal for $30 a ton. Coal is largely a product
of the railroad.
Coal was the material that made nationwide transportation possible.
In the late 1800’s, railroads helped create the coal industry
in the USA by demanding the material in large quantities for fuel
in their steam engines. When the railways switched to diesel in
the 1950’s, the coal industry slumped drastically. Coal
companies reacted by developing economies of scale, employing
new technology to move staggering amounts of material, with huge
draglines and haul trucks, the largest land machines in the world.
By the late 1960’s, coal fired power plants began sprouting
up in the Midwest, mushrooms of opportunity fed by a stream of
cheap coal, delivered by the railroad.
Within the network of strip mines in the Powder River Basin
is one of the busiest and most lucrative railway systems in the
nation. Dominated by the national Union Pacific and Burlington
Northern Santa Fe railways, 80 trains a day move coal from Wyoming,
each with over 100 cars, and each over a mile long.
At the North Antelope Rochelle Mine, up to 2,000 rail cars a
day are loaded, filling over a dozen trains a day, and more than
5,000 trains a year. At Black Thunder, over 7 million coal cars
have been loaded over the life of the mine. If they were all connected
together, they would create a train that would spiral around the
girth of the globe three times.
Though the coal industry is said to have been suffering in recent
years, the rapid rise in oil prices, as well as other factors,
seem to support the market of coal for the immediate future. According
to the industry, the USA has a quarter of the world’s coal
reserves, said to be the largest energy resource of any kind -
oil and gas included - within the borders of a single country.
And much of it is in Wyoming, making this rural state one of the
most potent places in the landscape of energy. All you need to
do is dig it up, move it, and light it on fire.
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