Coal

Coal is a general term for a wide variety of solid materials that are high in carbon content. Most coal is burned by electric utility companies to produce steam to turn their generators. Some coal is used in factories to provide heat for buildings and industrial processes. A special, high-quality coal is turned into metallurgical coke for use in making steel.

A. Reserves
The world’s coal reserves are vast. The amount of coal (as measured by energy content) that is technically and economically recoverable under present conditions is five times as large as the reserves of crude oil. Just four regions contain three-fourths of the world’s recoverable coal reserves: the Asia Pacific, including Australia, 29.7 percent; North America, 26.1 percent; Russia and the countries of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 23.4 percent; and Europe, excluding the former USSR, 12.4 percent. China possesses 11 percent of the world’s total coal reserves.

B. Current Trends
In industrialized countries, the greater convenience and lower costs of oil and gas in the earlier 20th century virtually forced coal out of the market for heating homes and offices and driving locomotives. Oil and gas also ate heavily into the industrial market for coal. Only an expanding utility market enabled coal output in the United States, for example, to remain relatively constant between 1948 and 1973.

Even in the utility market, as oil and gas captured a greater share, coal’s contribution to the total energy picture dropped dramatically—in the United States, for instance, from about one-half to less than one-fifth. The dramatic jumps in oil prices after 1973, however, gave coal a major cost advantage for utilities and large industrial customers, and coal began to recapture some of its lost markets.

In contrast to the industrialized countries, developing countries that have large coal reserves (such as China and India) continue to use coal for industrial and heating purposes.
The average price of coal has remained virtually unchanged since the early 1980s and is forecast to decline in the early part of the 21st century. However, in industrialized countries the need to comply with stricter environmental regulations has made burning coal more costly.

C. Pollution Problems
Despite coal’s relative cheapness and huge reserves, the growth in the use of coal since 1973 has been much less than expected, because coal is associated with many more environmental problems than is oil. Underground mining can result in black lung disease for miners, the sinking of the land over mines, and the drainage of acid into water tables. Surface mining requires careful reclamation, or the unrestored land will remain scarred and unproductive.

In addition, the burning of coal causes emission of sulfur dioxide particles, nitrogen oxide, and other impurities. Acid rain—rainfall and other forms of precipitation with a relatively high acidity that is damaging lakes and some forests in many regions—is believed to be caused in part by such emissions . The U.S. Clean Air Act of 1970 (revised in 1970 and 1990) provides the federal legal basis for controlling air pollution.

This legislation has significantly reduced emissions of sulfur oxides—known as acid gases. For example, the Clean Air Act requires facilities such as coal-burning power plants to burn low-sulfur coal. In the 1990s concern over the possible warming of the planet as a result of the greenhouse effect caused many governments to consider policies to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions produced by burning coal, oil, and natural gas.

During the world’s rapid industrialization through the 19th and 20th centuries, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased approximately 28 percent from pre-industrial levels. Solving these problems is costly, and who should pay is a matter of controversy. As a result, coal consumption may continue to grow more slowly than would otherwise be expected. The vast coal reserves, the improved technologies to reduce pollution, and the further development of coal gasification still indicate, however, that the market for coal will increase in coming years.