http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Role_of_Coal.html

Saturday, January 7, 2006 · Last updated 3:34 p.m. PT

Mine tragedy a reminder of coal's role

By ADAM GELLER

AP BUSINESS WRITER

  Coal miners prepare to leave for work inside the North River No. 1 Mine some 700 feet underground, Thursday Jan. 5, 2006 in Berry, Ala. Many of the workers at the mine say they love their jobs and have no plans to leave despite the dangers and deaths like those in West Virginia earlier this week. (AP Photo/Rob Carr) 

When Rick Honaker was growing up in coal country, his grandmother would dispatch him to the backyard, pail in hand, to scoop up the shiny, black rocks that fed her stove. It was the only fuel in a home that had long sent its men to the mines.

Now, a generation later, the only time Honaker's own children have ever seen a lump of coal is when he brings one home. Honaker, who teaches mining engineering at the University of Kentucky, figures his kids need to see where they came from - and where we all may be going.

Until this past week's mining tragedy in West Virginia, coal was very much out of sight, out of mind - and, for many people, just as well forgotten.

But even as the tragic death of 12 men beneath the ground reminds the nation of its grimy coal-mining past, the ebony jewel they sought remains very much part of our present. Even if we don't know it.

"There's a whole gamut of reasons why there's this lack of understanding, for the lack of people not being able to see how important coal is to their lives," says Honaker.

It's hard, at first, to see how that could be the case. The notion of a coal-fired stove seems old-timey now, and a coal furnace almost unimaginable. To see a coal delivery truck in one of our big cities, or a coal-driven locomotive steaming across the countryside now, would be as anachronistic as a horse and buggy.

Meanwhile, the coal miner's union is a shadow of what it once was, when its bulldog of a leader challenged President Franklin D. Roosevelt for political power. And in cities like Pittsburgh, where factories long ago filled the sky with soot and smoke, the coal fires have been relegated to memory.

But if we don't see or feel or smell the power of coal any more, that does not mean we have left it behind.

More than half this country's electricity is supplied by coal. About 130 new coal-fired power plants are on the drawing boards for the next few years, and that could be just the beginning.

With the price of power sharply higher, the U.S. - long known as the Saudi Arabia of coal - is likely to be relying on it for generations to come.

Coal, its image notwithstanding, is not old-fashioned. It's just that most Americans have the luxury of ignoring it.

"The problem is, it's not burned by us directly. It's burned in power plants. And because of that we can live with the illusion that coal is the fuel of the past," says Barbara Freese, author of "Coal: A Human History," a book documenting the rock's role in industrialization.

The story of coal is the odyssey of a humble fuel, but one in such abundance that it could change society.

That story played out first in England, whose tremendous coal reserves helped make it the world's most powerful nation. It continued in North America, as coal played a vital role in shaping America over the past two centuries. It helped spread the American frontier westward, powering the new nation's railroads. It drove the industrialization of Northern states, helping them defeat their Southern rivals in the Civil War.

By the early 1900s, the U.S. was a coal colossus.

More than 700,000 men worked in the mines. The rock they hauled up was a part of everyday life far beyond Appalachia's hills and hollows. In many towns, the wagons that brought ice to American homes in the summertime hauled loads of black anthracite in the winter. Coal was the primary fuel for cooking and heating, as well as factories.

The supremacy of coal, harnessed by union leaders, gave lowly miners real power for the first time.

By the 1930s, John L. Lewis was one of the nation's most recognized figures, a big-shouldered man with famously bushy eyebrows regularly seen by Americans in movie theater newsreels. He was the ruler of the United Mine Workers, a union unlike any other previously seen.

Not satisfied to limit his influence to the mines, Lewis argued that workers throughout the economy had to try a new way - his way - to organize entire industries, rather than professional trades. To make his point, Lewis broke away from the mainstay of the union movement, forming the Congress of Industrial Organizations and pouring his energies into helping build the United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers of America.

During World War II, Lewis proved his power, taking miners out on strike and infuriating Roosevelt. The miners won. In the late 1940s, Lewis won his workers the right to employer-provided health care, a huge victory that alone transformed society.

"He was a giant," says Lee Adler, who teaches employment law at Cornell University and spent years defending West Virginia miners arrested or disciplined during strikes. "John L. was known to all those (workers') families because he was the leader. And he was known to the ruling class, because they were scared of him."

Ironically, Lewis' labor victories also turned the tide against the miners and set off a revolution in coal. In winning health care, the union leader also agreed to let the coal companies begin automating the mines.

As machines took over for men, the balance of power shifted. In the two decades following the war, the number of miners dropped by almost two-thirds; by November 2005, the number was 79,200, according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics. Producers increasingly harvest coal at the surface, rather than by sending men into the ground. And they've shifted mining away from union strongholds in Appalachia to places far removed from most population centers. Today, Wyoming has displaced West Virginia as the nation's biggest producer of coal.

Even as that happened, America's everyday familiarity with coal also began to decline, as consumers and companies shifted to other types of fuel.

Coal briefly reasserted itself in the national consciousness in the 1970s, when the oil crisis left Americans searching for alternatives.

The resurgent interest helped companies like Williams Coal & Oil, in Braintree, Mass. attract loads of new business, as thousands of homeowners near Boston bought and installed coal stoves to heat their homes.

"They would call and say give me a truckload and dump it in my backyard," says Brian Williams, the third generation of his family to run the business. "Those days, we were running seven trucks a day, seven days a week."

But when the flow of oil resumed, the interest in coal vanished.

When Williams chartered a bus last fall, and took 38 of his employees to Pennsylvania to tour a coal mine, most of them gaped in awe. They had never seen anything like it. Who knew there was so much coal out there?

"They talk about it to this day," he says. "They say it was unreal."

The fact is that even as coal disappeared from everyday life, Americans were still using coal. Plenty of it. While the number of people working in the mines dropped, the output continued to climb, a response to demand from electric power providers.

But by the 1990s, even the electricity business was looking beyond coal. The future would be charted with a new type of power plant, clean and cheap, run on natural gas. Between 1998 and 2002, the industry built scores of those plants.

Now that the time has come to power up those plants, however, there's not nearly enough natural gas to run them and what there is costs seven times what it used to.

"In some places, you can't even turn those plants on," says Robert McIlvaine, who runs an environmental and energy consulting firm that bears his name.

Which brings us back to coal.

Today, utilities are planning 130 new coal-fired plants, and another 20 or so plants that rely on coal gasification, a process that turns solid coal into gas. Not long ago, experts would've told you that chances are many of those would never get built.

But with the high prices of other fuels, people have stopped asking if there is a need for 130 plants. Coal is hot.

"The question is whether that will swell to 200 or 300 or more," McIlvaine says.

The new coal-fired plants are much cleaner than the old ones. But with debate raging over global warming, building scores of new plants is by no means a settled question.

And finding the answer goes back to the point raised by Honaker, the professor whose Lexington, Ky. campus is powered by coal.

The nation's coal reserves could last 250 years, some experts say. Maybe longer.

But given the world's rapidly rising energy needs, the struggle to protect the environment, and the costs of extracting coal, how long can we afford to continue ignoring its place in our world?

"If you ask a student in my class, where does electricity come from," Honaker says, "I bet you 50 percent of them would point to the light switch."