Monday 20 April 2015
coal clean enough to bring inside
A story I helped write is out in the New York Times. Click here to see it. Theres even a slide show. The story is about people burning coal for home heating, and how the high price of heating oil and natural gas (at least for the 18 months leading up to September, I guess) has renewed interest in the "alternative" fuel.The idea first caught my attention up here when I read that some 400 tons were being burned each year in the Fairbanks borough. (Tons always seems like a lot, but coal is pretty bulky and heavy -- a typical home uses about 5 tons a winter.) Then, as often happens when new ideas come to your attention, I heard about coal everywhere -- my prof at UAF used to burn coal, the Golden Eagle Saloon burns coal, a friend of a friend burns coal. Honestly, I was surprised anyone was still burning coal. My parents had a small coal stove in New York City, but that was the 1970s.
Here in Alaska, the town of Healy, where the Usibelli coal mine is located, has burned coal for a long time -- at the school, the community center, and a big housing unit for tourism workers, among other places. The mine burns coal at its office building and maintenance shop, and miners get free coal as a job perk. But the trend in the last two years is startling. Lots of people who never burned coal before are starting to. Last year, the mine sold about 650 tons of coal for residential and small commercial. year -- through October only -- its already sold 1,500 tons. Here in Fairbanks, you can see people driving around with pickups filled with coal. The community food bank has switched to coal heat, along with about a dozen churches, a laundromat, and a few apartment buildings, according to the owner of North Pole Coal, which sells coal and coal stoves. Coal is locally available and cheap. Vendors say coal-burning technology is better now than decades ago, when pollution was less of a concern, and a lot of the heaters are outside, with buried pipes bringing hot water to the home. Handling coal still leaves your fingertips black, but would you really want to hold heating oil instead?
Coal gets a bad name for its carbon footprint, producing much more CO2 per unit of energy than oil or natural gas, and thats what seemed so backward to me at first -- that Americans would be switching to coal just as the rest of the world is trying to green up, or so it seems. But the numbers are small enough (only about 200,000 U.S. households burn coal, and its a tiny amount compared to coal burned to make electricity) that the carbon impact isnt a huge deal. More important, at least here in Fairbanks, is what the coal burning is doing to air quality. Fine particulates are becoming a critical issue here, and it seems a cruel twist that people are switching to polluting wood and coal burning just as the borough is considering partial burn bans. And, according to some people, the coal furnaces stink.
The pics are of North Pole Coals shaker-sorter at the Usibelli mine, an outdoor wood/coal furnace, and Mark Sanford, the owner of North Pole Coal.
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