Anthracite coal mining (Wilkes-Barre, York, Wyoming: 2013, home, buy)

[Mouldy Old Schmo]

What happened to the anthracite coal mining in Pennsylvania? There is such a demand for "clean" coal now.

[thecoalman]

Coal mining in Pennsylvania peaked around 1918 for both soft and hard coal.

Peak Year of Coal Production
Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1918 (277,377,000 short tons).
Anthracite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1917 (99,612,000 short tons).
Bituminous . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1918 (178,551,000 short tons)

That total was only recently eclipsed by Wyoming. Soft coal in the western part of the state is still a very big industry with something like 50 million tons annually which puts in fourth on the list of coal producing states.

Anthracite is a shadow of former self with about 5 million tons of production. The primary use was and is for domestic heating purposes both residential and commercial. It's much more expensive to mine and commands a very high price because of that and other desirable characteristics for home heating.

You can buy soft coal retail for about $60/ton, anthracite is going to start around $170. Because of the cost and other things it is unsuitable for power plants. People switching to other heating fuels primarily oil in the 20's onward caused a steep decline in demand and production.

[Wells5]

The latest production report available (2013) shows total tonnage of newly mined anthracite coal at 4,678,709 tons (4,590,820 from strip mining and 87,889 from underground mining). A lot of anthracite coal is used as a filtering media in chemical plants and for water purification. Also, exports of anthracite to China have been rising steadily driving up prices. See link below.

http://files.dep.state.pa.us/Mining/...ionSummary.pdf

[thecoalman]

The filter media is derived from sizes smaller than barley which is pretty much a waste product at least as far as home heating goes. Barley is like a large grain of sand. They don't go out of their way to make filter media because even barley has discounted price. The reason anthracite is preferable over sand filters is because it fractures into odd sized pieces unlike sand which is going to be rounded. The filter lasts much longer.

The exports to China are for coking applications.

[thecoalman]

Just to elaborate anthracite goes through a lot more processing than soft coal. The seams may be only be 4 foot thick and you get a lot of rock and bone in it. Bone is like cross between coal and rock.

This is where the breaker comes in. A typical operation is going to have the raw product going onto belt where the smaller sizes than can be as small as dust are separated from the larger pieces which may be measure in feet. Any of these really large pieces that is rock is picked by hand. What is left of these larger pieces then gets crushed down to a size usually no larger than a softball. That is combined back with the smaller pieces separated earlier.

At that point you separate whatever rock is left usually using what is called a menzies cone. This cone has a slurry of magnetite which floats the coal and the rock sinks.

http://nepacrossroads.com/kbfiles/im.../df/00007a.png

Now that you have the rock separated it isi off to the sizing plant, typically there is going to be about 7 sizes.


Stove - Anywhere between baseball and softball sized
Chestnut - Between the size of a baseball and golfball.
Pea - About the size of quarter.
Buckwheat - About the size of a dime.
Rice - About the size of pencil eraser
Barley - Really large sized grain of sand.
Everything smaller - Basically dust and as previously mentioned is typically used for filters. My understanding is the filter company actually separates this into 20 different sizes.

[Clark Park]

Mr. Coalman ... I'll wager you know the answer to this question:

When did they stop employing "Breaker Boys" at the Collieries? Was it mostly because of the introduction of child labor laws, or was it because of new technology that made that job unnecessary?

[thecoalman]

If you look at the pictures of the breaker boys what they are usually doing is picking rock. That job is now performed by the Menzies cone, back then anything smaller than pea was considered waste. Rice coal which is about the size of an eraser was waste, today it's the most popular size because it's used in automatic stokers. When they get around these old breakers reclaiming land they are actually seeking out where that may have been dumped because you could have millions sitting a few feet below the ground. Same thing with old RR tracks, they literally mine them because that waste was often use to build the bed.

Those kids couldn't do the job of Menzies cone today. Whether it was the menzie's cone that got rid of the kids or it came about because of the loss of the cheap labor I don't know. They certainly did many other jobs so ultimately it would be the labor laws that moved them out of the breakers and mines.

[Clark Park]

Thanks, Mr. Coalman.

[Mouldy Old Schmo]

Originally Posted by thecoalman

Anthracite is a shadow of former self with about 5 million tons of production. The primary use was and is for domestic heating purposes both residential and commercial. It's much more expensive to mine and commands a very high price because of that and other desirable characteristics for home heating.

I wonder if that's the coal some New York pizzerias use.

[Gerania]

Originally Posted by thecoalman

If you look at the pictures of the breaker boys what they are usually doing is picking rock. That job is now performed by the Menzies cone, back then anything smaller than pea was considered waste. Rice coal which is about the size of an eraser was waste, today it's the most popular size because it's used in automatic stokers. When they get around these old breakers reclaiming land they are actually seeking out where that may have been dumped because you could have millions sitting a few feet below the ground. Same thing with old RR tracks, they literally mine them because that waste was often use to build the bed.

Those kids couldn't do the job of Menzies cone today. Whether it was the menzie's cone that got rid of the kids or it came about because of the loss of the cheap labor I don't know. They certainly did many other jobs so ultimately it would be the labor laws that moved them out of the breakers and mines.

My grandmother wouldn't allow my father or uncle to work at the breaker. Grandfather worked as an electrician and maintenance man in the mines. I remember people going to what is now Coal Street Park in Wilkes-Barre with wagons to pick coal in the 1960's.