Assessing the Pollution from Underground Coal Fires
November 4th, 2009
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A topic which is rarely covered in the mainstream media, and which has come up on many occasions here at Depleted Cranium is persistent underground coal fires. These fires can burn for decades and are notoriously difficult to put out – although there has really not been much effort to try. They destroy huge areas of land, killing vegetation, producing dangerous sinkholes and occasionally producing surface fires. Their enviornmental impact, both locally and globally is very significant, but it has been difficult to measure precisely.
However, Discovery News reports on renewed efforts to gain data on underground fires:
Pollution from Underground Coal Fires Tallied
Nov. 4, 2009 — Right now, thousands of coal fires are burning out of control around the world. The fires are heaving untold amounts of mercury, the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) and other pollutants into the air.
The fires are notoriously hard to monitor; they tend to start at the surface but quickly scurry underground, only to ooze gases through soil and cracks in the ground. But an ambitious new study is now taking the first steps toward tallying their contribution to air pollution around the world.
Earlier this year, Allan Kolker of the United States Geological Survey in Reston, Va. and a team of scientists traveled to the Powder River Basin, a coal-rich region straddling the Wyoming-Montana border where dozens of fires are burning.
Using ground-based measurements, the team found that the Welch Ranch Fire emitted about 12 tons of CO2, and about 270 milligrams of mercury per day.
That’s not much, but it’s just one fire. Measuring the perhaps tens of thousands of coal blazes active in the world will be an arduous process, but the team hopes to speed things up by developing a method to fly over fires in an airplane and measure heat using an infrared camera. Carbon dioxide and mercury emissions should relate to temperature, which would allow researchers to calculate emissions from a fly-by.
12 tons of CO2 per day is certainly significant, but the amount of mercury is much more concerning, especially given that it is emitted near ground level, seeping up past vegetation, soil and potentially people in the area. The Welch Ranch Fire is actually a very small coal seem fire, as far as coal seem fires go. The fire has been surveyed before, as locals had complained to the government about the fire, which is located on land owned by the Pittsburg and Midway Coal Mining Company. The fire is the result of historic mining activity in the area and is considered a threat to health, safety and property by the Bureau of Land Management.
The Welch Ranch Fire has received attention primarily because of the proximity to local residents and because of the obvious surface features. However, when compared to other fires it is quite small. There are thousands of fires burning in the United States alone. Some fires in Colorado, Pennsylvania and West Virginia dwarf the Welch Ranch Fire, although they are small compared to fires burning in China, India and Indonesia. Yet even a small fire can burn several tons of coal in a day and produce 12 tons of CO2 per day.
Team member Leonard Levin of the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., said that fires could emit 200 tons of mercury each year, but he called the figure a “wild guess.”
A report issued by the USGS earlier this year suggests just 48 tons are emitted annually, but even that is roughly equivalent to all of the mercury generated by coal-fired power plants in the United States.
People living in towns and villages near the blazes could be at higher risk of mercury or arsenic poisoning. Mercury also accumulates in fish and waterways.
Carbon dioxide figures are even more elusive. In the same report, authors (Kolker among them) estimated that China, the world’s largest coal-producing country, lost anywhere between 10 an 200 million tons of coal a year to wildfires, or between 0.5 and 10 percent of national production.
That is a HELL OF A LOT OF mercury! Even by conservative estimates, this is a huge problem on many levels. However, given the numbers from Welch Ranch and other fires surveyed, I’m inclined to believe that the problem may be even higher than some of the estimates given. It is also important to note that these measurements and estimates pertain directly to the emissions which make it into the atmosphere. They do not include the massive amounts of mercury, arsenic, cadmium and other toxic substances which may find their way into the local soil and water table from the ash left behind by these fires. The voids left in the ground by such fires are an extreme hazard to safety and can act as channels for oxygen to continue to reach the fire. They also have been known to fill with water, which can make its way into local aquifers or bodies of surface water.
At least they seem to be getting some media coverage recently.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Enviornment, Good Science, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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November 4th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDyHyUCZIQc
Here is an interesting documentary about this problem, this whole village in India, seems to be on fire from below. It looks like heal on earth.
Also, this demonstrates the need to reduce electricity consumption, and focus on safe mining practices and better technology.
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November 4th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Bruce said:
Yes, it is very bad and India is one of the worst places because of the population density, with many living in areas that are not fit for human habitation because of these fires. There are equally bad fires in the US, but generally nobody lives over them.
They are very dangerous and hazardous to health. Homes can fill with carbon monoxide and weakened ground can cave in without warning.
Bruce said:
First, no amount of improvement in mining technology or safety will change anything with the fires already burning. At best, that can stop new ones from happening as often, but these will continue to burn until some better action is taken or until they run out of fuel – which may take centuries.
I’m not sure how this relates to reducing electricity usage. Plenty of those in places like India cook and heat with coal or use coal to heat cement clinkers or blast furnaces.
There is no such thing as clean coal. The sheer volume of the stuff you need and the composition of coal makes it inherently dirty. You can blow the filth out a stack and then it’s in the atmosphere. You can scrub some of the filth out of the exhaust, but then what do you do with it? Leave a pile somewhere to pollute the ground water of eventually break through the containment dam and cover homes and acres of land?
Coal mining is always very destructive because you need to do so much of it. A coal fired power plant can consume a mountain of coal in a year – yes, literally enough coal to make a mountain. There’s no way to move that much material without causing a lot of change to the land, usually bad chance. Coal can be processed to reduce sulfur and ash. They can break it up and wash it to remove a lot of resdedue, but that only leaves millions of gallons of contaminated water.
You always end up with a mountain of nasty, filthy, toxic material and it’s hard to find places to put it. There is so damn much of it, it’s not economical to treat it or transport it like other forms of waste.
Co2 capture is a fantasy. The idea that you can grab the millions and millions of tons of Co2 and clean it, concentrate it, refrigerate and compress it, without losing a large portion of the energy you’ve generated is ridiculous. It’s an engineering feet to just do it and end up with better than break-even energy return. Then where do you stick it? There are not that many places you can stick this stuff and be confident it will stay there. Depleted natural gas fields work. Salt aquifers may work, but there’s debate about that. The deep ocean *should* work, although potentially with extreme ecological impacts. If convection currents change and bring the stuff up at all, it could be catastrophic.
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November 4th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Coal Seam Fire
The kobolds in the coal
slumber with livid blood
because we long forgot
to sacrifice our offspring.
Cut veins awaken them
after we mine the ores
hoarded for centuries.
Sunlight plus oxygen
makes nitroglycerin —
we flick lit cigarettes
on dynamite, then act
surprised. Eyepits ignited,
the goblins underground
metastasize the masses
out of their sleeper cells
deeper beneath stone skin
than we can probe with pokers.
These elementals haunt us
with a coal heart that smolders
until we let them smother
our children in their beds.
Steven D. Schroeder – from The Bitter Oleander
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November 4th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
And yet another example of the massive indirect subsidies that coal companies get. They are allowed to create enviornmental disasters and when their activities cause a fire or something, they can walk away from it and the government ends up taking on the cost of moving everyone away, paying for property damage etc etc.
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November 5th, 2009 at 12:28 am
Russ said:
That’s an excellent point. Imagine the media ****storm if a nuke plant or Uranium mine were to render a town like Centralia uninhabitable. We’d hear about it constantly from every media outlet in the country.
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November 5th, 2009 at 3:03 am
Chuck P. said:
I’m actually surprised that even Bruce would come out in favor of billions of dollars worth of subsidies directly to coal. Why not just replace it with wind? Oh, is someone suddenly realizing
Chuck P. said:
That is the least of it. Coal gets HUGE subsidies at every turn. A mine explodes and traps workers – the Mine Safety and Health Administration, FEMA and the state and local authorities come in and pay to rescue them. Then they pay to clean it up. Coal companies destroy huge areas of land and then just relinquish their claim to it and hand it to the government to deal with.
The fact that these fires are even still burning and we don’t hold the companies accountable to put out their goddamned fires is another thing.
Then we subsidize all kinds of other things. Programs for healthcare to the workers with black lung and subsidies to build railroads to coal mines to take the coal away. States like West Virginia let coal companies get away with almost anything and pay for the damages it causes.
It’s sickening!
And no, a nuclear plant would never get away with the crap they do. Massive ash spills swamping the homes of the poor sap who lives in the wrong place. Whole communities have their water supply tainted, rivers destroyed by the runoff, mountains blown to all hell.
Hell, look at Germany if you want even worse. The GOVERNMENT pays to move towns! Yeah, the coal mine is encroaching on your town, so what do they do? At government expense they buy your property (doesn’t matter how long you’ve lived there and how much it means to you) and rip it down and then buy your whole town new homes somewhere else. Heck, they even dig up granny’s bones to make way for the coal. Not that I’m religious, but it still makes me cringe to think of my grandparents remians being chewed up in a bucked-wheel because they didn’t get them all when they moved the cemetary!
Oh yeah, what a progressive, wonderful energy policy that country has.
Not that we do much better.
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November 5th, 2009 at 3:04 am
For some reason the first quote in my last comment is cited to the wrong person.
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November 5th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Surprising that the stuff coal companies get to dump on the government to clean up or deal with gets so little attention. As far as fires go then I could understand if it is in a mine from the 1800’s and there is no longer any trace of the original owner, but if a modern coal company has a fire that is polluting the local water and air and endangering lives, then damnit they should be required to put it out, regardless of the expense, because it’s their damn problem and its damaging more than their own property. Why get a free ride?
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November 6th, 2009 at 12:44 am
Why not require the coal companies have enough money to pay for the clean-up before they are allowed to even start extracting the coal?
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November 6th, 2009 at 2:12 am
Fire needs air to burn. Fire doesn’t burn underground, retard.
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November 6th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
^Mich is a genius. He’s just proven why underground kilns don’t work.
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November 6th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Mich said:
There are fissures and porous ground and abandoned mine tunnels also make the problem much worse. The fire also burns out coal and creates voids under the ground as it burns, and oxygen can flow through those.
Retard.
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November 6th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Mich said:
The people of British Columbia would tend to disagree with you on that one, seeing as how there are two currently ongoing in that province. There’s a German one that’s been burning since the 1600s, and there are a bunch in Colorado and Pensylvannia, as well.
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November 6th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
I thought you might be interested in our new report. EWG just released a report about the air pollution created by common household and school cleaners. We have a bunch of downloadable tools to help parents and schools work together to green their cleaning. And a 1-page tip sheet for safer home cleaning. You can view the report here: http://www.ewg.org/schoolcleaningsupplies.
Thanks!
Lisa Frack, Online Organizer -EWG
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November 6th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
From the EWG website being promoted by Lisa Frack:
“Nuclear power is an outmoded, heavily subsidized, high-risk relic of the Cold War that presents far too many serious hazards to justify its continuation. From terrorist strikes, to transportation of waste, to the constant risks presented by operating the plants themselves, nuclear power is, by any rational measure, far more risky than it is worth.
Yet as a nation, we rely on nuclear power for 20 percent of our electricity. The time is now, for the United States to begin to cut our dependence on nuclear power, and seriously fund alternative energy sources that are far less risky to our health, our environment, and our national security.
An excellent way to begin this transition is to halt the knee-jerk relicensing of nuclear power plants, and to take the time we have left under current operating licenses to move the nation to cleaner, safer transitional energies like natural gas and cleaner coal, and ultimately to renewable energies such as solar and wind combined with a serious commitment to energy efficiency. If these alternatives were subsidized at amounts equal to the subsidies granted the nuclear industry, there is no doubt that a transition to a nuclear-free future could be achieved over the next 20 years.”
That tells me all I need to know about the credentials of that pseudo-environmentalist group.
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November 6th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
The EWG is the same site that was making the rounds recently with their “list of best and worst cell phones” for radiation. They also included some vague references about how “We don’t know the concequences” etc etc.
They mention on several pages that they’ve done work with Freinds of the Earth.
Also, check out their toxins section and their children’s health section. It’s a complete list of all the bogus claims and unsubstantiated bs. They’re against flouridization of water (the same crap some have been harping on since the 1950’s, but still no actual evidence of harm). Crap about how Teflon is dangerous to human health (again, this has been claimed for decades but extensive study hasn’t found much of anything). Then they have crap about fire retardants and fireproofing material, plastics etc.
Demands for “renewable energy mandates” and so on are all across the page. You can also check out “health tips” for a laugh.
Yeah, this is not the kind of organization I will be caught dead endorsing. The site lacks any real hard science and is full of politics and fear-based BS. They’re cut from the same cloth as Greenpeace and FOE. Unfortunately they seem to be doing a good job at keeping up the appearances as a wolf in sheeps clothing.
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November 19th, 2009 at 3:01 am
Coal fires underground? Seems like a non problem to me. The problem is we need to reshape society from the ground up to be about less consumption and that means especially energy. Stop caring about yourself and start caring about others and the world #1. That is the root of all enviornmental problems. I believe we are seeing the change all around us.
That is just my two cents.
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December 20th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
drbuzz0 said:
It is good that humans can alter the environment for human benefit, but I think these days of “environmental” extremism, we forget about the cost-benefit calculation, that helps determine whether intervention is beneficial to humans. I think many wildfires, and especially the underground coal fires, aren’t worth fighting, for several reasons. We simply can’t afford the high cost of taming all of nature just yet, and some things are better left wild, at least for now.
Reasons why most underground coal fires should be left to grow wild:
1. Because many are too far gone to control, out of control, and impossible to control.
2. Because many of them are in unpopulated regions, and thus, aren’t much of a real problem.
3. Because they spread so slowly.
4. Because we can’t control everything anyway.
5. Because it’s cheaper to move the people out of the way of the naturally growing underground coal fires.
Like Josh says, I think it’s mostly a non-problem, as we can’t seem to control weather nor volcanoes either. Sometimes it’s better to just nature do its thing. But I disagree with Josh’s statement about needing to reshape society to use less consumption and energy. That ideas just isn’t consistent with leaving such things wild. Wild then should mean not needlessly interfering with people’s freedom, which means let them consume, use energy, produce things, multiply their growing human numbers, etc.
The people at the Jharia coal fields in India, should be allowed to move somewhere better, or to stay put, as they choose.
drbuzz0 said:
So let the people move if they want, or stay if they want. It seems to me that if there are big coal companies supposedly responsible, then they would be liable to assist in people’s or village’s moving expenses, but not in fighting impossible-to-control coal fires.
drbuzz0 said:
Yes, I think we have to allow some additional coal fires to ignite, but better safer technologies may be able to reduce the otherwise rising number of them. And we can’t reasonably stop all the poorly done poor people coal mines, as people deserve all sorts of ways to reduce their poverty. Just because satellite surveillance may show some remote underground coal fires naturally growing hotter and bigger, or about to spread into huge coal veins, soon to become impossible to control, doesn’t mean they need to be fought, because we don’t have to control everything anyway. Especially in unpopulated regions. (I can understand why there hasn’t been much effort to control the spreading coal fires, because it’s so pointless and futile.) So it’s okay to sit back and watch more coal fires naturally go on growing much too large to ever control. It’s a fact of life that nature remains still somewhat wild, unable to cost-effectively be tamed by man/ Nature naturally burns off excess hydrocarbons, and plants need the carbon dioxide anyway. Another reason for more coal mines, is to get at coal before it burns naturally from spreading coal fires, unless there are safer and better areas to mine instead.
drbuzz0 said:
Not just that, but increased access to electricity, and cheap electricity should be encouraged, considering the dirty alternatives. Electric and gas cookstoves displace millions of smoky cooking fires in growing cities. The smoky cooking fires cause the people respiratory problems, so let them modernize to using stoves and microwave ovens like we in developed countries enjoy, which are more compatible with growing huge cities and overcrowded shantytowns. Even if the electricity comes from cheap coal, it’s still better than burning fuel directly. Electricity energy is far easier and safer to control than direct cooking fires, more efficient, and removes the pollution release away from highly populated urban centers.
Increase electricity usage is also needed to better accommodate naturally rising human populations, more comfortably and safely. Many modern population accommodations, of the sort that now allows massive and densely populated cities, rely on abundant energy to run them, to pump the water to flush all the indoor toilets that help properly manage all the growing volumes of human wastes from cities around the world ever filling with people.
Now whether electricity is supposedly sort of a “contraceptive” isn’t really the point. What else is there to do in the dark villages at night, but make ever more babies? But electricity helps better manage/accommodate natural human population growth. It’s the latter effect I am interested, without making any effort to limit the natural growth of human numbers. Any true “environmentalists” should naturally object to people being pressured to limit family size by directly polluting their bodies with nasty experimental Big Pharma contraceptive potions and poisons. Anyhow, places where people have electricity, for whatever reasons, probably don’t expand their human populations so wildly and naturally as places that don’t, well except for inward migration from people depopulating the countryside. So there is both more ample means, and more time, to Adapt to the rising population levels.
drbuzz0 said:
If we want the cleaner cheap abundant alternative, wouldn’t that be more nuclear power plants? But the “environmental” radicals are still too opposed to them. Which then is a reason to go ahead mining more coal, and building more coal-fired electricity power plants. Because as we speak, human populations continue to grow around the world, and to properly support them in growing cities, we need cheap, affordable, abundant, and dependable energy. Coal is still a huge part of that mix, while so-called “green” electricity isn’t anywhere near up to the challenge in abundance, cheapness, or 24-7 dependability.
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December 20th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Q said:
Mich does have a point though. He should have said something more like “Fire doesn’t burn so fast underground as to make it much a problem.” The lack of air slows the burn, but doesn’t always stop it.
The oxygen in our atmosphere is so reactive that it can burn things underground. So in a way, we are choking in the rampant plant “pollution” of oxygen. But then we don’t think so, because we need oxygen to breathe, so it’s a good thing there’s so much of it.
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December 20th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Dr Robotnik said:
Because you like a “free ride” also. If you like affordable electricity, or think we might have to observe the laws of physics, then I can see them letting most major coal fires burn unchecked. The cost of fighting the coal fires can easily outweigh any possible benefit.
There’s also the matter of safety, in that human lives might be needlessly risked in gloriously futile fire suppression efforts. Once a mine catches fire, it may simply be too dangerous or impossible to reach the fire to control it. Isn’t cave-ins and explosions among the possible risks? The main concern is the safety of the miners, and running the mine properly. Once it catches fire, isn’t it already often much too late to do much anything about it?
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December 21st, 2009 at 4:09 am
Pronatalist said:
If you have not been a reader of this blog much, I’ve expressed the opinion that affordable and cleaner/safer energy can be achieved by means of nuclear fission. I find coal so extremely costly to human health, the enviornment, the econemy both directly and indirectly that it is not worth the cheap direct price. Coal fires are just one of the big costs of coal. I’d like to stop using it for base load power and start cleaning up the mess that has been made in the process of extrating it.
Coal mine disasters, ash spills, cave ins and sink holes already cost lives. Emissions cost even more.
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December 21st, 2009 at 8:55 am
drbuzz0 said:
I’ve followed the Depleted Cranium blog where Google points me about coal fires. Otherwise, I haven’t found my way around to other threads all that much.
I do not believe in fertility “control” of the already huge human race. I advocate large families worldwide, so that far more people may experience life. However, as the ever growing human race increasingly fills the planet, presumably, eventually, some population accommodating changes in the commonly used technologies may need to be made, as cities naturally swell and coalesce into one another, as people multiply more and more. So I agree with you about nuclear power, for what else could adequate power huge megacities that may tend to naturally grow and fill with people, seemingly “out of control?” Far better to explore cost-effective ways to clean up some of our technologies, than to pollute the body directly with harsh, experimental, shoddy, Big Pharma contraceptive potions and poisons. They call it “natural increase” for a reason. Family size used to be considered “uncontrollable,” and with the bewildering array of shoddy anti-life methods available now, I consider it still practically and morally “uncontrollable,” well except for the perspective of welcome “all the children God gives,” and letting God decide the proper population size.
Actually, I think the underground coal fires are but a minor nuisance cost of coal. We hear little about the coal fires, because they are largely inconsequential for most people. The big cost, is the dirty, dangerous job of mining coal. It’s risky to human life. However, people need the jobs, and are willing to do it for us. Until we actually make serious strides to go ahead with more nuclear power, we are economically, even politically stuck with coal, because most of the “green” electricity is still not dependable for basic 24-7 baseload, and too expensive for the populous poor masses to afford.
And I think that the millions of smoky cooking fires in growing cities, pose a much greater pollution hazard to so many billions of people, than uncontrollably naturally spreading underground coal fires. There’s a simple solution to the cooking fires problem. The electrification of most every remote village. Obviously, at least here in the United States, half our electricity comes from coal. So we aren’t near ready to reduce our coal consumption, and as populations naturally rise, and as very populous countries like China and India modernize, coal mining and consumption, is going to probably, at least temporarily, have to increase. Pie-in-the-sky “environmental” non-solutions, simply don’t work, until issues such as economics, affordability, and basic human freedoms are also factored in and considered fairly.
By most practical measures, there’s places all around where we can put more people, so that people are free to go on reproducing their precious darling babies naturally without polluting their bodies with any form of “birth control.” But in some sense, most all countries already have “more than enough people,” if all that was considered is the bare minimum people to make a society work. But we aren’t mere cogs in a socialist machine state. But for many poor countries not doing enough to modernize, they can tend to be “bursting at the seams” with people, when it comes to easily treatable factors like proper disposal of human wastes. So what is far more urgent, than doing much about coal, is promoting freedom, leading to more economic prosperity, so that more people can afford proper indoor flush toilets, to help keep their waterways cleaner.
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