Gob piles are piles of waste made up of a small amount of coal mixed with shale and other mineral byproducts from coal mining operations. Gob stands for garbage off bituminous. Gob piles are also called boney piles, culm dumps, or simply coal refuse piles. During mining, non-coal minerals are collected from within the coal seam or from the walls, ceiling, or floor of the mine. Combining the minerals with the coal makes a mixture referred to as low-grade coal. This low-grade coal has a low heating value (the amount of heat that is released as it is burned) and so it cannot be sold with the other coal from the mine.

History
Early coal mining is the source of all the existing gob piles—some even date back to the late 1800s. Before 1920, coal was removed from mines by hand picking and loading. Breaker Boys or Boney Pickers removed rock, slate, and other non-burnable debris from coal as it passed by on a conveyor to the coal breaker. Historically, young boys or older workers who couldn't work as miners anymore did the job. This created piles of waste within the mine, but they were small due to the manual operations and did not cause significant problems.

In the early 1920s, larger mines became mechanized. Machines could remove large quantities of coal in the same amount of time that a person could load a single car by hand. The mining machines could not distinguish between waste rock material and coal, so all the material was transported to the surface. Other machines were developed to sort the coal from the waste once it was removed from the mine. Mechanized coal mining substantially increased the rate of waste production. At the time there was little concern with the proper disposal of the waste created, so the waste was often dumped in a haphazard manner in very large piles. These piles are the gob piles that are left scattered throughout the country at abandoned mine sites. Some pose no threat to the environment while others can be potentially hazardous.

In 1977, President Carter passed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA) banning the formation of new gob piles. This left the one outstanding issue: what to do with the existing gob piles.

What do we do with Gob Piles?
There is no single solution to deal with gob piles and funding for remediation activities is a major obstacle. SMCRA provides some funding to reclaim waste piles abandoned before the passage of the law. This funding is through an Abandoned Mine Land (AML) fund, which is funded by a tax paid by active coalmines. Half of the funds collected from each state go to the individual state's reclamation program and the other half goes to the Office of Surface Mining (OSM) to respond to emergencies and carry out high priority cleanups in states without their own programs. Often, communities or environmental groups will garner funding to clean up sites on their own. Several colleges also have programs that allow students to work on active reclamation sites for training and education purposes.

Remediation of gob piles generally takes one of three forms: 1) removal, 2) reshaping or reuse, or 3) no remediation.

No Remediation: Some gob piles do not pose a hazard because of their composition or location. Other piles are so large or isolated that remediation is not practical. These piles are usually left alone unless something happens to change the circumstances.

Reshaping
Reshaping  gob piles has taken many different and sometimes creative forms. Smaller piles can be spread out, flattened or graded, compacted, and then replanted. Usually, the graded pile is covered with soil so plants can take root and to help stabilize the ground. In one case, a pile was converted into a golf course feature, while another was converted to an ATV park.

Other efforts reduce the expense of moving and adding soil to the piles by planting hardy grasses to lower the surface temperature of the pile and helps capture the seeds of native plants and allows them to grow. One such grass is Cape American beach grass. This grass survives after being continually buried in sandy areas and withstands severe heat—conditions that are similar to those on gob piles.

One gob pile in West Virginia that had not experienced growth in 20 years was planted with sprigs of beach grass over a 2-acre area. After five growing seasons, native species, including blackberry and ragweed, dotted the surface of the site. The cost of the two acre planting, including the sprigs, fertilizer, and labor was only $7,500. A conventional reclamation using heavy equipment and soil would have cost at least $125,000 for the same area.

	Above: Gob pile before planting at Jacob's Fork. Below: Planting of 50,000 beach grass sprigs for trial at Jacob's Fork.
	[Photos from Erosion Control, feature article July/Aug 2000]

Reuse
One successful method for actually removing gob piles, other than transporting them to a different waste location, is to reuse them (or at least the coal in them) as a fuel source in a circulating fluidized bed boiler to generate electricity. Gob piles used for fuel must meet certain criteria to make the effort economical. A pile must have a heating value of around 5,000 BTU/ton (regular coal is around 12,000 BTU/ton); must be within reasonable distance of a power plant; have the right composition; there must be a compelling need to remove the pile; and the user must obtain the appropriate permit to remove the gob. These factors dictate that only a fraction of the existing gob piles can be reused this way.

But creativity works. In Greene County, Pennsylvania, where there are numerous gob piles, one company is developing a plan to build a power plant that will use the coal waste as fuel. Perhaps the most prohibitive cost associated with building a plant of this type is the transportation costs of the waste coal from the dumpsite to the plant. This plant will be built near an abandoned mine and make use of the gob pile there. When that pile is depleted, the power plant will be able to use other gob piles located along the Monongahela River. The waste coal from these piles would be transported in barges to the plant site. If successful, this plant may pave the way to new options in reusing gob piles.