THURSDAY, APRIL 30, 2009
DEBATES
A special section to the
KENTUCKY KERNEL
WWW.KYKERNEL.COM
RAGE IN SEARCH FOR ANSWERS ON THE
Future of coal Stories and photos by Brad Luttrell | bluttrell@kykernel.com
S
urface mining in its active phase is ugly. Everyone seems to agree on that, from the coal company executives to the UK students who intern there and especially to the university’s anti-coal activists. What they don’t agree on is the future of coal mining, energy consumption and reclaiming the abandoned mine lands. With coal consumption expected to rise, the activists want answers now, while the coal companies say the technology is not available, or affordable. The only certainty: No one has reconciled the future of coal.
Top: Mining engineering senior Tyler Wright prepares a drilled hole to be blasted on top of a strip mine. Wright and four other UK students interned at International Coal Group in Perry County, Ky., over Winter Break. Above left: Nate Waters hugs his niece, Maggie Mae, 3, goodbye after coming home to Strunk, Ky., for a family visit. Waters, a mining engineer, said he missed his niece’s birth because he was in Wyoming, working at a coal mine. Above right: Scott Beckmeyer, co-organizer of UK Greenthumb and agricultural engineering senior, pumps his fists in protest of a coal power plant in Washington, D.C. He and 5,000 other people blocked off all the entrances to the plant in March in protest of coal.
A coal truck drives down a mountain near Van Lear, Ky., in Johnson County after being filled at a surface mine. Johnson County yielded over 2 million tons of coal in 2007, according to the Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, Kentucky produced 115 million tons of coal in 2007, which is approximately 2.5 million legal coal truck loads. That number of trucks would wrap around the world a little over one time.
PAGE A4 | Thursday, April 30, 2009
DIGGING INTO THE NUMBERS
Kentucky coal facts The only two states that produce more coal than Kentucky are West Virginia and Wyoming. The most recent report showed 417 mines in Kentucky.
115 Number of short tons of coal Kentucky produced in 2007 Above: Between two coal plants on campus, UK burns about 40,000 tons of coal a year, Physical Plant Manager John Zachem said. This coal plant is located on Upper Street next to the Peterson Service Building. Top right: Coal sifts down to be burned at the coal plant on Upper Street. This coal heats water, which makes steam that cranks a turbine to create electricity.
Coal is burned to heat water, which is then turned to steam. The steam will rise and spin a turbine, which then turns the electric generator rotor to create electricity. UK burns about 40,000 to 42,000 tons of coal a year, Physical Plant Manager John Zachem said. He said UK is paying $147 per ton this year, and paid $87 per ton last year, and $93 the year before. Coal rates have gone up and natural gas rates have dropped, but UK still finds that coal is the cheaper fuel, Zachem said.
2.5
million
million
Number of legal truck loads to carry 2007’s production
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time Number of times 2.5 million coal trucks wrap around the planet Short tons (2,000 pounds) produced according to U.S. Department of Labor GRAPHIC BY BRAD LUTTRELL | STAFF
Coal executive, activist disagree on results of mining Erik Reece and Don Gibson are outspoken about coal use, but the only thing they can manage to agree on is thinking the other is wrong. Reece, who teaches English at UK, is one of Kentucky’s most dynamic anti-coal activists, who gained national attention for his article “Death of a Mountain,” published in Harper’s Magazine and for writing a book, “Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness,” that told the story of a mountain’s demise due to mining in Perry County, Ky. Gibson is a coal company executive who has spent his career extracting coal, and, if it’s necessary, removing a mountaintop to do it. He is also highly involved in the reclamation of these mountains, or returning the original vegetation. Gibson is director, permitting and regulatory affairs for International Coal Group in Perry County, which is the second-highest coalproducing county in the state, with 12.7 million tons per year. On principles alone, it seems to make sense why the two might not see eye to eye, but it’s much more complicated than that. Jump back five years, when Reece decided to write his book. He chose a mountain called Lost Mountain simply because a year later, after the strip job was complete and all the coal was extracted, “this mountain really would be lost,” Reece said. After a year of driving to the mountain and watching the company “incognito,” Reece gave up on Lost Mountain. “There wasn’t much more to see or say. Only more of the same,” he wrote in his book. But Gibson, who works for the company that was licensed to mine coal in Perry County, said there was a lot more to see. “I kind of felt that, as I’m sure was his point, he was trying to make us out to be the bad guy,” Gibson said. “He didn’t try to portray anyone from this company as trying to be honest with him or working with him on it.” Other than feeling misrepresented a couple of times, one of Gibson’s biggest problems with Reece’s book was that it
Erik Reece, seen here in front of UK’s coal pile on Upper Street, is an anti-coal activist at UK who thinks the state is ready to stop using coal. was published before the land could be reclaimed and restored by the company, International Coal Group. But Reece doesn’t have much faith in reclamation and doesn’t even agree with the term because he doesn’t believe anything is restored. “I’ve never seen a mountain restored to its original contour,” he said. “Which is what the law says has to happen.” Reece said he has never seen ginseng or wildflowers put back on a mountain. “You hear a lot of people say that reclamation is putting lipstick on a corpse,” Reece said. “What you’re doing is replacing the biologically diverse ecosystem in North America with a monoculture, one species of grass.” But Gibson believes his company is on the forefront of many improvements, such as putting honeybees back into Kentucky’s ecosystems and sticking to native wildlife. “Since ICG came into existence in October of 2004, we’ve planted in the neighborhood of half a million trees, all native hardwoods,” Gibson said. Atop what used to be the summit of
the mountain, now reclaimed to Gibson, and considered a desert by Reece, are hundreds of American chestnut saplings, planted by local students during the Kentucky Arbor Day Festival on Lost Mountain hosted by International Coal Group. Gibson said he believes the site is an improvement over what it was, which to him was unusable, unlevel land. “Without level land in Eastern Kentucky, you’re either on stilts or in a flood plain,” Gibson said. This argument is actually the first to come to mind for Reece when asked what makes him mad about the coal industry. “They like to say they’re creating flat land for people,” he said. “They’ve created so much flat land now in Eastern Kentucky you could put the city of Louisville down. There’s not enough people there for that kind of development.” Reece decided to write his book after seeing how much of the flat land, or “wasteland” as he calls it, surrounded one of his favorite natural habitats — UK’s Robinson Forest. Reece just realized he couldn’t write about this place in a celebratory way with-
out also writing about the forces that destroy it, Reece said. After researching all the new applications for permits, not even sure what he was looking for, Reece found one for Lost Mountain, and said the name was so ironic, it was perfect to tell the story of strip mining from beginning to end. But to get the whole story, Reece felt he had to do it his way. If you visit a strip mine with the company, they won’t show you where they’re not in compliance with the law, Reece said. So, he trespassed once or twice a month for an entire year to see what was happening on Lost Mountain. Gibson remembers Reece being found by miners on the site and said the company offered to have him hazard-certified and give him tours of the land. Several times in Reece’s book he describes being surprised by explosions and dodging flyrock, the earth that is lifted into the air from a blast of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil combination. “Of course we are blasting up there. If you’re out there on foot, it’s not a safe place to be,” Gibson said. With alarms sounding before each blast that can be heard half a mile away, a guided person would be safe, said UK student Nate Waters, a company intern and soon-to-be employee. However, Gibson is very open that he’s not sure they ever would have given Reece the clearance he wanted. For that clearance, Reece repeatedly parked his truck at the foot of the mountain and hiked what he figures was over 100 miles after the entire year. “There’s really no way to report on an industry as corrupt as coal without going behind the scenes,” Reece said over four years after his last monthly trip to the mountain. When Reece said he told Gibson that it was nothing personal with his company, he just liked the name, “Lost Mountain,” Gibson only had two words for him. “Lucky us.”
Future of energy use depends on discussion I have been around coal for as long as I can remember, but I never really questioned coal mining until I came to college. My grandfather died of complications related to black lung, even though the company officials told him to just cough up the coal dust and he would be fine. A coal mine collapse killed one of my cousins, and another collapse put an uncle on disability. Another one of my uncles died in a car crash on his way back from work, again in the mines. My greatgrandfather helped start the union in Harlan County, Ky. by meeting with other miners at night in the woods to get organized. It was too dangerous to even speak of opposing the coal companies in those days, and gun fights and murders gave my home county its infamous name, “Bloody Harlan.” I never really thought of the environmental or economic consequences because coal miners provided for their family. My other grandfather would take me with him on trips to get mine equipment, which he worked on and also sold as scrap metal. My cousins and I used to dig
up his yard, using plastic bulldozers to remove tiny mountains, which we hauled off in toy coal trucks. Now, of the four of us, I’m the only one who does not work on a surface mine, where real trucks are carrying out millions of tons a year. After four years of college, I’ll be graduating to make nothing near what they are paid on a strip mine, blasting off the tops of mountains and hauling out the black gold. My cousins, grandparents and uncles are not the enemy. The same coal they blast out of a mountain, you are using right now. If you used electricity today – watch television, flip any light switches, refrigerate your food or walk into any modern building – then you are as much a part of the problem as the coal companies. Mountaintop removal is an unsightly process. When working on these stories, I never heard a single person involved with the industry say they like seeing mountains blasted apart. In fact, they admit it’s ugly seeing them ripped of trees and tops blown off. But that statement was always followed up with justification – what else are we to do?
The anti-coal activists have about as many answers to that question as the miners have tons produced per year in Kentucky (well over 100 million). It’s wind, solar and nuclear. But renewable energies will have to come from an industry other than coal. It’s unlikely any coal company will spend the millions of dollars it would take to kill their business. Why should they? Coal demand is expected to increase after the recession. That’s not to say there are no coal miners who aren’t interested in the discussion. Mining engineer Nate Waters believes if you’re going to blast a mountain off, you need to do your best to fix it. He also loves to talk about the future of energy. And so does Erik Reece, an anticoal activist who teaches at UK. But they are coming from starkly different sides, and the discussions usually end unproductively. There is enough coal in the U.S. to mine for 225 more years. Reece believes an energy crisis may be upon us in 10. Waters said he plans on mining for his entire life. After talking to both sides extensively for months now, I’m not sure where I
stand on coal. I know I am far more conscious of my light switch staying on, and that every day when I walk past UK’s coal pile on campus I think about how it powers every thing we do, from the computer I am typing on, to the lights that are on in a classroom right now. I hope this story engages discussion on campus, but more than anything, I hope you will be more conscious of your energy usage, and maybe just flip the switch off when you leave a room, or turn the air conditioner off in your apartment when you’re gone for the weekend. Even if you don’t have four or five generations of coal history, you’re a part of coal’s history in Kentucky. We all are.
Brad Luttrell is a journalism senior. Continue the coal conversation: kykernel.com and e-mail bluttrell@kykernel.com