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....

	One type of mining, called "longwall mining", uses a rotating blade to shear coal away from the underground seam.

Coal Mining and Transportation
In the centuries since early humans learned that the black rocks they picked up on the ground would burn, we have had to look for coal below that was hidden below the earth's surface. One of the areas it was easiest to find was where it appeared as one of many layers of materials along the side of a hill.

Then we found we could follow the coal layer (seam) deeper and deeper into the ground. Some mining sites today in the United States may be close to 500 feet underground.

Mining is classified by the method needed to reach the coal seam. When the coal is found close to the Earth's crust and taking away the overlying layers of material is not too expensive, surface mining is used to remove the top layers of materials and expose the coal.

If coal is found in layers far from the surface, underground mining is the preferred technique. Vertical or slanted holes ("shafts") are cut down to the mining area underground for ventilation for the workers and for transporting the miners, equipment, and coal. Common types of underground mining are the drift, shaft, and slope mining methods.

In the mine, coal is loaded in small coal cars or on conveyor belts which carry it outside the mine to where the larger chunks of coal are loaded into trucks that take it to be crushed (smaller pieces of coal are easier to ship, clean, burn, etc.).

The crushed coal can then be sent by truck, ship, railroad, or barge. You may be surprised to know that coal can also be shipped by pipeline. Crushed coal can be mixed with oil or water (the mixture is called a slurry) and sent by pipeline to an industrial user.

LEARN MORE ABOUT CLEAN COAL TECHNOLOGIES