A Brief History of Coal Use

Coal is the most plentiful fuel in the fossil family and it has the longest and, perhaps, the most varied history. Coal has been used for heating since the cave man. Archeologists have also found evidence that the Romans in England used it in the second and third centuries (100-200 AD).

In the 1700s, the English found that coal could produce a fuel that burned cleaner and hotter than wood charcoal. However, it was the overwhelming need for energy to run the new technologies invented during the Industrial Revolution that provided the real opportunity for coal to fill Its first role as a dominant worldwide supplier of energy.

In North American, the Hopi Indians during the 1300s in what is now the U.S. Southwest used coal for cooking, heating and to bake the pottery they made from clay. Coal was later rediscovered in the United States by explorers in 1673. However, commercial coal mines did not start operation until the 1740s in Virginia.

The Industrial Revolution played a major role in expanding the use of coal. A man named James Watt invented the steam engine which made it possible for machines to do work previously done by humans and animals. Mr. Watt used coal to make the steam to run his engine.

During the first half of the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution spread to the United States. Steamships and steam-powered railroads were becoming the chief forms of transportation, and they used coal to fuel their boilers.

In the second half of the 1800s, more uses for coal were found.

During the Civil War, weapons factories were beginning to use coal. By 1875, coke (which is made from coal) replaced charcoal as the primary fuel for iron blast furnaces to make steel.

The burning of coal to generate electricity is a relative newcomer in the long history of this fossil fuel. It was in the 1880s when coal was first used to generate electricity for homes and factories.

Long after homes were being lighted by electricity produced by coal, many of them continued to have furnaces for heating and some had stoves for cooking that were fueled by coal.

Today we use a lot of coal, primarily because we have a lot of it and we know where it is in the United States. To find out more about how coal is mined....

http://www.fossil.energy.gov/education/energylessons/coal/coal_history.html

COAL is our most abundant fossil fuel. The United States has more coal than the rest of the world has oil. There is still enough coal underground in this country to provide energy for the next 200 to 300 years.

But coal is not a perfect fuel.

Trapped inside coal are traces of impurities like sulfur and nitrogen. When coal burns, these impurities are released into the air.

While floating in the air, these substances can combine with water vapor (for example, in clouds) and form droplets that fall to earth as weak forms of sulfuric and nitric acid - scientists call it "acid rain."

There are also tiny specks of minerals - including common dirt - mixed in coal. These tiny particles don't burn and make up the ash left behind in a coal combustor. Some of the tiny particles also get caught up in the swirling combustion gases and, along with water vapor, form the smoke that comes out of a coal plant's smokestack. Some of these particles are so small that 30 of them laid side-by-side would barely equal the width of a human hair!

Also, coal like all fossil fuels is formed out of carbon. All living things - even people - are made up of carbon. (Remember - coal started out as living plants.) But when coal burns, its carbon combines with oxygen in the air and forms carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless gas, but in the atmosphere, it is one of several gases that can trap the earth's heat. Many scientists believe this is causing the earth's temperature to rise, and this warming could be altering the earth's climate (read more about the "greenhouse effect").

Sounds like coal is a dirty fuel to burn. Many years ago, it was. But things have changed. Especially in the last 20 years, scientists have developed ways to capture the pollutants trapped in coal before the impurities can escape into the atmosphere. Today, we have technology that can filter out 99 percent of the tiny particles and remove more than 95 percent of the acid rain pollutants in coal.

We also have new technologies that cut back on the release of carbon dioxide by burning coal more efficiently.

Many of these technologies belong to a family of energy systems called "clean coal technologies." Since the mid-1980s, the U.S. Government has invested more than $3 billion in developing and testing these processes in power plants and factories around the country. Private companies and State governments have been part of this program. In fact, they have contributed more than several billion dollars to these projects.