Simple Process of Coal Production and its Effects

Coal is a fossil fuel that has been formed over millions of years of heat and compaction of organic material under layers of rock. Miners use a process called mountain top removal to get to the coal. They strip the layers of mountain to get to the underlying coal. They then clean the raw coal through water and chemicals to remove unwanted materials until all that is left is good burning coal. They then load the coal onto a train and send it to a coal-fired energy plant. At the coal-fired energy plant turbines are used to produce energy by burning the coal, making electricity. The turbines are cooled by water so coal plants are usually by a lake or waterway.

The process of mining coal is detremental to the mountains as well as the people and wildlife that live around the mountains. I attended a meeting recently of the Sierra Club Lunz Group where Dave Cooper, a retired engineer who has dedicated his life to research and preservation of the Appalachin Mountains, showed a slideshow of how big coal is affecting the state of West Virginia. The mountains are drastically transformed by the coal group's excavation efforts. There are tremors and landslides due to the process. The wildlife in West Virginia has been adversely affected due to the changes occuring to their habitats. People are also affected. The by-products of cleaning the coal consist of water and chemicals termed "slurry". The slurry is pumped into the large craters in the mountains where the coal was previously removed. From there the slurry has been leaking back into the water table of West Virginia making water unsanitary. This water is causing many people to become sick and people are being diagnosed with cancer at an unusually high rate.

The effects of coal on West Virginia is one reason to use electricity efficiently. More than 80% of our energy here in South Carolina comes from coal and West Virginia supplies some of that coal. Our electricity here in South Carolina is some of the cheapest in the world right now but the environmental and human effects could prove to be a high cost in the future.