A 46 Year Old Coal Mine Fire is Nothing

Last night I received a link from a friend to a googlesightseeing page about a coal mine fire currently burning in Centralia Pennsylvania. As he was, I was shocked to learn that it started in 1962 and continues to burn to this day. Started by a trash fire in a landfill that was located in an abandoned strip mine, it has ravaged the area and now only nine of the 1000 residents it had in 1981 are left in this ghost town (look at these before & after pictures of the area). There are no plans to put this fire out and it is estimated that there is enough fuel there for it to burn for the next 250 years! As outrageous as that is, I found even more incredible facts about coal and coal mine fires as my curiosity lead me on a journey through wikipedia and the Internet to learn more...

This 46 year old fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania is only one of thousands of mine fires currently burning throughout the world. In the western United States (the country with the largest recoverable reserves of coal, followed by Russia) such as Wyoming and North Dakota, there are many mine fires. Apparently, they usually start naturally due to a lack of ventilation and cooling which makes coal susceptible to spontaneous combustion. In fact, Lewis & Clark reported wild coal mine fires burning in the west at the beginning of the 19th century! [coal, wikipedia]

China Leads the Pack of Thousands
More coal mine fires are known to be burning in Tajikistan, Turkestan, India, and especially in China. China’s fires alone are estimated to consume 20-200 million tons of coal per year (to put it into perspective, "During the third quarter of 2007, U.S. coal production totaled 285.6 million short tons") and makes up as much as 1% of the global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels [coal, wikipedia]. Some Tajikistan coal deposits have been mistaken as active Volcanoes and are thought to have been burning for thousands of years. Original explorers of Burning Mountain in Australia also thought it was a volcanic, although it too is a coal mine fire. Burning Mountain has been burning for 5500 - 6000 years! This great article at Smithsonian Magazine tells the story of coal mine fires more eloquently.

Coal is not Clean
I also learned that "clean coal" is merely a marketing term created by the coal industry (coal has poisons throughout it, you have to put them somewhere). It is purely theoretical (there is no such power plant in existence and won't be for at least a decade), and is widely believed (1,2) to not be economically viable unless governments subsidize the way they subsidize oil companies. Then I learned that the US government is already subsidizing "clean coal", but in the most prominent $1.8 billion dollar project, the DOE has withdrawn funding from the project after the DOE's share went from the original commitment (by percentage) of $620 million to $1.33 billion after the cost overruns thus far. New subsidies for plain old "dirty coal" were renewed in 2005 too. All worth considering as we go into an election year in the US with most (all?) of the candidates casually insinuating that their belief in investment in clean coal is one of the solutions to our high automobile gas prices (of which I still see no reasonable relation between coal and the price I pay at a gas station).