America is fortunate to have a seeming endless supply of coal; the United States Geological Survey says that we may have as many as 4 trillion tons of coal located in underground coalfields. This coal can be used to generate electricity, which can power us into the future. Coal is relatively inexpensive, a major factor leading to low energy costs we all enjoy. The problem with our vast coal supply is that it is very difficult to reach the coal buried deep underneath the earth.
Coal powered generation plants are the only feasible way to power our nation into the 21st century. States that rely almost exclusively on coal for power generation have up to 40% lower energy costs. Currently coal produces 54% of our nation’s power, and provides over 170,000 permanent full time jobs that can never be out sourced, many of which pay over $50,000 a year in areas where coal jobs are the only jobs available. For every coal mining job a additional 3.5 jobs are created elsewhere in the economy. By using coal we provide jobs for Americans, while at the same time reducing our dependence on foreign oil, additionally coal helps to reduce the negative impact unstable oil prices have on our economy, and national security.
America’s coal reserves contain 12 times the energy of all the oil in Saudi Arabia. According to the United States geological survey there are 1.7 trillion tons of known coal reserves across our nation, and some estimate there may be as many as 2.3 trillion tons that have yet to be discovered.
There are two major problems with coal; the first is that coal burning of coal to generate power results in the release of lots of emissions, epically Carbon Dioxide, one of the main pollutants that contribute to global warming. However we have made great strides in increasing the pollutant standards in coal fired power generation plants, in fact Coal plants today emit 90 percent less pollutants (SO2, NOx, Particulates, mercury) than the plants they replace from the 1970s, according the National Energy Technology Laboratory. The second problem with coal is that the techniques used to retrieve coal are extremely devastating to the environment. One technique used is known as mountain top removal, in this method the earth on top of the coal is simply pushed aside, so that the coal may be more easily retrieved. This devastates the nitrogen cycle, and destroys the ecosystem on the mountain, but allows the miner to easily retrieve the coal. It is important to note that mountain top removal is not used very widely, and only contributes roughly 10 percent of all the coal mined annually in the United States.
Mountain top removal does have its benefits, it is much safer for the miner than traditional underground mining, it greatly reduces the occurrence of black lung in miners, and eliminates the deaths caused by roof falls, which occur when the weight of the roof of the mine is not properly supported, and it the roof falls on the miners, crushing them. Most mining deaths occur because of roof falls. Mining deaths have dropped significantly since the wide implementation of mountain top mining, 1,546 annually in the 1930’s, when the only type of mining was traditional underground mining, now that mountain top mining is more commonly used only 65 miners were killed in 2006, even though the amount of coal mined each year has increased significantly.
Our position is that coal is so important to the health of the United States that the benefits of coal outweigh the negative impacts of coal. This is not to say that we think we should rely solely on coal to power our country forever. We as a country need to invest tremendous recourses into developing alternative energy sources because the simple fact of the matter is that coal like oil and any other limited recourse will run out sooner or later. However at this time there are no clean energy sources that can come close to providing half of the electrical energy for our country that coal currently produces. We see coal as a way to power us until these newer technologies can take coal’s place as the largest means of generating electricity in the United States.
Critics of the coal industry say that the benefits of coal do not outweigh the negative impacts coal has on the environment. They say we should replace coal immediately with alternative energy sources, but no current energy source can produce enough power to take the place of coal. Coal is terrible for the environment, and we as a nation need to work on reducing emissions, but right now we cannot afford the dramatic increase in the price of electricity that would come from reducing or eliminating our use of coal as a power source. The answer is to use coal to power our nation until we can develop the technology necessary to take the place of coal.
The United States has vast coal recourses, enough to provide us with lots of cheap power, but in order to extract the coal form the earth we must destroy the environment to get it. We need coal to power us into the future, but we need to be investing tremendous resources to develop alternative energy sources to eventually eliminate our dependence fossil fuels.
Works Cited
Electronic Field Trip to a Coal Mine. KET. Web. 11 Nov. 2009.
Fast Facts about Coal. National Mining Association. Web. 11 Nov. 2009.
A Handbook To Appalachia. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee, 2006. Print.
"Injury Trends in Mining." Injury Trends in Mining. United States Department of Labor. Web. 28 Oct. 2009.
