Back in 1987, when Chrysler bought Jeep from AMC, the plan was to kill off Jeep. Chrysler bought it because AMC had recently spent just over one billion dollars building a brand new assembly plant for Jeep. Chrysler paid 1.5 billion for all Jeep assets. If an automotive assembly plant was a billion dollars to build 4 decades ago, today’s cost is astronomical. Somewhere in the vicinity of $15,500,000,000 USD.
A fabrication company I worked for spent close to 6 million on a laser CNC machine to get delivered and installed from like Sweden or something. The first thing they cut on it was a dinosaur out of a 1/8th piece of scrap stainless lmao
Average miner produces 7 tons of coal a day. That is $700 or about 200,000 a year in production. Ofcourse the miner only takes home 40-50k. (assuming labor regulations)
The average US coal miner makes about $80k, considering they mostly lived in inexpensive places, that’s pretty good pay. I can’t imagine a job that I’d rather have less though
Some make it a longgg time. A few of my wife’s relatives were active miners and lived into their late 80’s and early 90’s. Rough life though. And that specific area has decent hospitals. Go figure .
That’s amazing. Every miner in my family history didn’t make it past 60ish, if that. Decent hospitals too! I mean they also drank a ton but when you mine 🤷
So they create ~$700 directly through their physical labour, but only receive $300? Why? That's $400 missing, and there are hundreds of him at the company. Who decides what to do with the extra 40 thousands of dollars every day?
Those places are inexpensive to live in because there isn't a whole lot around. When you have to drive 100 miles to the nearest college, and 50 miles to the nearest hospital bigger than a Whole Foods, of course it is cheaper to live there. Add in the poison water supply in some coal mining towns and cost of living goes way down until you die of cancer.
Open cut is referring to mining from the surface. Basically, remove all the garbage earth that is above the coal. Then remove the coal, and once the coal is gone, you put the garbage material back.
It's all done using a fleet of heavy machinery, and you can't really quantify a "tonnage per person" in the same sense as you can in this video.
Ah, it also involve a lot of explosives, right? I asked because the comment about 7 tons never said how many tons are extracted in total per year, just per worker.
This is not the "average", this is some unregulated illegal mine. This shit has been completely mechanized for the past half century in developed countries.
Not average coal miner….if they work in a depressed area I’m sure that’s close to what they make right now but most coal miners I know have a base salary of around 90 to 100k and have the option to work more up to around 150k. It’s hard work but they aren’t servants. The majority have good jobs.
It looks like you take 7 tons and the whole cavern will collapse. For sure they know how to do this, the most of fatalities in coal mines are related to methane explosions, not to usual extraction.
Carrying it out and loading I think the record was 66 tons in a day (24hrs) with 15+ being standard for experienced miners per shift. About 1 pallet worth per ton. It is certainly doable.
Whoever owns the mine that does zero labor thinks it’s worth it, but of course the working class people are paid pennies on the dollar for what their time is worth. We are slaves.
Gemini tells me you can put 20 kg of coal into an average bucket. 1 metric ton is thus 50 buckets. So that's $2 per bucket of coal. Still not a lot. With big chunks, the bucket would fill relatively quickly. But surely the workers would only see a fraction of that money.
Utility companies buy them by the train load. I did an audit for one and they paid $13 per ton. So if you get a lump of coal for Christmas it’s fitting that it’s literally worth nothing.
Looking at that slab of cool dropping about how much does that weigh? 50 lbs? I’m just curious. Trying to understand the amount of coal that would be a ton.
Wow makes me wonder how it is profitable to mine coal, excluding people wanting cheap dirty energy, but for the person extracting it, they must be paid like slaves
Also burning it is heavily subsidized by most governments, because the cost from the massive damage it will cause our civilization is just discounted as a "future generation problem".
First I understand this is sarcasm but I'm going to rain on your parade anyway.
Coal itself is made from ancient forests that have died and been buried underground for millions of years usually it happens in sedimentary basins but this is an oversimplification for time saving.
It's a lot when you factor in the high density. the big chunks they got out of the wall with their pneumatic drills probably weighed several hundred kilos each.
True, from what I could find it seems that the density of anthracite (very pure mined coal) is in the range of 1.3-1.8 g/cm3 (so about 1.5 kg per L, or 1500 kg per m3). They could definitely drill off a few hundred kg at a time when they encounter veins of this size.
I got a tour of the Falkirk mine in North Dakota, it’s an open hole and they use house sized dump trucks to move over burden (everything above the vein of coal), all the equipment is preposterously massive and expensive. The first vein is 60 feet below the surface, they reclaim all the land and return it to the farmers as they move along. They operate 24 hours a day 365 days a year and have been open since 1978 with another ~60 years or something crazy before they expect to run out of material. All their shovels and some of their larger hoes are electric, everything else is diesel.
So how much is that amount of coal worth? Not much but collectively it justifies operating and maintaining all that equipment none stop in North Dakota and they don’t even power that big of an area.
Side note: before our tour I was watching these massive transport truck move across the horizon and they’re so big they look much closer to you and like toys, it was a very interesting experience.
Coal floats, whereas the vast majority of impurities like rock do not, so they run the coal through water and get rid of the impurities that sink to the bottom.
Downside of this is that it results in lots of toxic contaminated water that has to be disposed of carefully, which doesn’t always happen because the proper disposal methods are expensive.
Just the shiny black part, the matte rock is shale. Due to the way coal is formed, coal forms in seams alternating between coal and shale or mudstone, usually repeating tens or hundreds of times. The coal formation process starts with a swamp being covered in a layer of sediment and compressing over hundreds of thousands of years. This process repeats tens or hundreds of times in the same location, usually as the result of mountain building and erosion events. Coal is formed from compressed biological material, while shale is soliciclastic, meaning it's mainly quartz based and deposited via erosion.
There's a company in Louisville, KY that uses the shale to make pottery (Louisville Stonewear). Their stuff can be quite popular and sometimes expensive. My favorite coffee mug is from there.
Correct, it's called silicosis, it's the same reason you need to wear a mask and wet the blade when cutting concrete. Fun fact, the deadliest mining disaster in US history wasn't caused by a collapse, it was from a company intentionally ignoring silicosis safety precautions and killed between 476 to 1000 workers.
Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster
Shiny black part is vitrinite rich coal. That's the stuff that really burns nicely and consider high quality coal. Opaque grey part probably still burns but produces more ashes and not worth as much.
Most coal is from vegitation 300-240 million years ago, after trees evolved with lignin rich cell walls but before fungus that could digest those cells evolved. Trees would die and fall and cover the forest floor. Mostly in swampy areas sediment would eventually layer over the dead vegitation, and a new forest would grow on top. With enough layers the pressure from above compresses the layers of sediment into shale and the layers of dead vegitation into coal.
In dryer places plant debris would mostly be cleared through fires releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere. After the evolution of ligninolytic bacteria coal formation only occurs when vegitation is covered up relatively rapidly, creating an oxygen free environment.
Yeah I haven't come close to coal or they environments in years. As far as I remember coal purity is a mixture of the type of organic matter present and the maturation temperature reached. To low temperature and you get low quality stuff too high it turns in graphite I think so it has a sort of Goldilocks effect.
The only coal mine I've visited had very low quality stuff and the shiny, vitrinite rich layers, were often small to the point you couldn't truly separate it. Everything just wanted to the furnace together and therefore they had a lot of ash. Also a lot of diagenetic pyrite which meant further sulfur release to atmospheres. Nasty
Just the shiny black part.I have seen it in Jharia.
Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the earth, often through underground or surface mining methods. Coal has been a vital source of energy for centuries, but its extraction and use have significant environmental and health impacts.
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u/ScarletDrive92 8d ago
Is everything coal, or is it that shiny black part just the coal?