Print this pageCoal Availability/Recoverability Studies: How Much of Our Nation's Coal Resource Is Economically Minable?
CARTER, M. DEVEREUX, and TIMOTHY J. ROHRBACHER
Traditional Federal and State coal resource estimates do not account for the many societal and physical restrictions to mining. This has, in some instances, led Federal, State, and local planners to overestimate the future supply of coal. To expand the informational value of resource estimation, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and State geological agencies of the principal coal-bearing States cooperatively have selected representative small study areas in which they identify and delineate current land-use and technologic/geologic constraints on the availability of coal resources for development, estimate future mining and a washing losses, and perform economic evaluations to determine the economically minable coal.
Coal availability and recoverability studies conducted during the past seven years show that, in regions of the U.S. studied thus far, economically minable coal resources are not as abundant as have been reported in the past. Detailed resource analysis, through application of Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques, has been completed in sixteen 7.5-minute quadrangle areas in the Central and Northern Appalachian regions and the Illinois Basin. Findings indicate that, in these study areas, 50 percent of the original coal resource is available for mining, one-half of the remaining resource (or approximately 25 percent of the original resource) is recoverable utilizing current mining technology, and only 8 percent of the total resource can be extracted and marketed profitably - based on current market conditions.