Essex Greens - All About Coal

A Brief History of Coal in the United States 1300 - 2008

1300s: Hopi Indians used coal for cooking, heating, and to bake clay pottery in what is now the southwest United States.

1673: Louis Jolliet discovers coal in Illinois.

1748: First commercial U.S. coal production from mines near Richmond, Virginia.

1800: Coal is harnessed to power industrial processes, steamships, and trains.

1860s: Coal is used in Civil War weapons factories.

1870s: Coal becomes the primary fuel for iron blast furnaces manufacturing steel.

1873: “King Coal” is born, as wealthy railroad mogul Franklin B. Gowen buys several coal mining companies and forms a cartel. (Gowen's rail holdings are memorialized in the four railroads in the Monopoly board game.) See Killing King Coal

1875: Gowen's cartel dominates anthracite coal production. He cuts miners' wages, bringing on a series of bloody strikes. Bosses beat and kill countless miners, who in turn derail trains, sabotage machinery, and burn down mines.

1882: Thomas Edison develops the first coal-fired electric power plant in New York City. Residents complain about soot, so most future plants are built outside cities.

1897: The Lattimer Massacre takes place near Hazelton, Pennsylvania. During a peaceful demonstration against poor working conditions and low wages, county sheriffs kill 19 immigrant miners.

1902: The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) orchestrates a large strike in the anthracite mines of eastern Pennsylvania. President Theodore Roosevelt intervenes and guarantees the miners higher wages and better hours, though their union was still not recognized as a bargaining agent.

1910s: Mechanization comes to coal mining with the introduction of the conveyor belt, and many laborers are replaced by machines. (By 1940, 70 percent of West Virginia coal loading is done by machines.)

1914: The Ludlow Massacre follows a strike by the UMWA at this Colorado coal mine. On that day, 20 innocent men, women and children were killed.

1927: Miners with the Industrial Workers of the World union strike in Serene, Colorado, leading to the Columbine Mine Massacre.

1930s: Developing oil and gas technologies diminish the demand for coal.

1945: The anthracite coal industry starts to collapse.

1952: Across the Atlantic, the Great Smog of coal smoke in London kills 4,000 people in four days.

1970: The Clean Air Act and the new EPA target airborne pollution. The worst culprit is sulfur dioxide (S02), a byproduct of coal combustion that causes acid rain.

1970s: Softer, lower-quality bituminous coal replaces anthracite. Oil shortages spur demand, leading to the first mountaintop-removal coal mines.

1975 to 2002: Nearly all new U.S. power plants in this era are fired by natural gas, not coal.

1990: Congress enacts the Acid Rain Program to slash SO2 emissions. One consequence is a shift to low-sulfur coal (found mainly in the West) rather than high-sulfur coal from the East. Acid rain causes acidification of lakes and streams and contributes to the damage of trees at high elevations (for example, red spruce trees above 2,000 feet) and many sensitive forest soils. In addition, acid rain accelerates the decay of building materials and paints, including irreplaceable buildings, statues, and sculptures that are part of our nation's cultural heritage. Prior to falling to the earth, sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) gases and their particulate matter derivatives—sulfates and nitrates—contribute to visibility degradation and harm public health.

2000s: President George W. Bush's election brings a resurgence of coal power plant construction.

2003: Bush funds the FutureGen Alliance's "clean coal" carbon capture and storage project. Its funding was decreased in 2004, reinstated in 2005, and cut completely in 2008. There does not yet exist any practical application of this technology, so, at present so-called “clean coal” is only a wish.

2008: Barack Obama is elected president. During the campaign, he supported “clean coal” and the construction of five new carbon capture and storage coal plants. At present, there are two such power plants in the world—one in China that is under construction and a small one in Germany that separates out the CO2 to store it in an abandoned natural gas field. Adding such CCS technology (Carbon Capture and Storage) to coal plants tacks on roughly $65 per metric ton of CO2 to the cost of electricity, according to Howard Herzog, a research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), who also noted that it will take at least seven years until a commercial scale CCS power plant could even be built in the U.S., because of legal issues, permitting and the length of construction. Top