r/Damnthatsinteresting 8d ago

Video Coal mining

45.3k Upvotes

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67

u/No-Mail-8565 8d ago

I was thinking about that. How tf can that be profitable. I buy a bag here for 2 dollars.

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u/mmob18 8d ago

well, relative to the purchasing power of the companies that ultimately use the fuel, these guys are extracting it for free.

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u/Vegetable-Suit4992 8d ago

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".

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u/EldraziAnnihalator 8d ago

As it should, I'm living right now, let grown up kids worry about the environment once I myself am slowly turning into coal.

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u/SnooPickles4465 8d ago

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.

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u/Lou_C_Fer 7d ago

Yep. We aren't burning dinosaurs. We are burning the carbon left over from the forests you mentioned.

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u/Lime1028 5d ago

Should also be clarified that all this dates to the Carboniferus period, and it's a quirk of evolution that it exists at all.

It won't happen again. Fossil fuels are not renewable even over millions of years.

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u/Swimming-Scholar-675 7d ago

to be fair, that was how it worked out for the west lmfao

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u/LiftbackChico 8d ago

Because power companies burn it to generate electricity and will buy it by the boatloads

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u/Starfire2313 8d ago

Which means we are the ones ultimately paying for it because the electric companies must be making profits to stay in business.

Of course that’s obvious. But for whatever reason the thread was questioning it.

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u/less_unique_username 8d ago

The consumers would still be the ones paying for the coal even if the companies were somehow operating at zero profit

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u/Reasonable-World9 7d ago

Well, even if they were a nonprofit, it still costs money to do the deed. So yeah, we'd still pay for it.

Nonprofit doesn't mean they do things for free.

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u/exipheas 8d ago

You buy bags of coal for what? A home furnace or something?

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u/vandergale 8d ago

Christmas

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u/Was_It_The_Dave 8d ago

I accidentally on purpose taught my teen boy a lesson with this. He was big mad. Don't shoplift at YOUR CO-OP PLACEMENT WE HELPED YOU GET THEN!!!

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u/dirtycheezit 8d ago

Old school blacksmithing?

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u/exipheas 8d ago

If they don't answer I have assume they think this is a charcoal mine.

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u/dirtycheezit 8d ago

"charcoal mine" lmao. I think there's an extremely high likelihood your assumption is correct

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u/HeyLittleTrain 8d ago

Not sure about elsewhere but in UK/Ireland coal is extremely common for home heating.

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u/exipheas 8d ago

Yea but if you are doing that you probably aren't buying a "bag" at a time. The dude was thinking this was charcoal for the BBQ.

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u/HeyLittleTrain 8d ago

You totally do buy a bag at a time - maybe 2 bags. Not sure how else you would move it.

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u/exipheas 8d ago

The coal truck comes and dumps a couple of yards of coal down your coal chute....

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u/HeyLittleTrain 8d ago

Never heard of a coal chute but from Google it looks like a thing in your basement? Houses in UK and Ireland don't have basements so I guess that's why it's new to me.

Here the coal truck goes around and drops off these big 25kg bags of coal and you (or the delivery guy) pour them into an outdoor coal bunker (big plastic box). Most houses would have one.

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u/exipheas 8d ago

Yea so if you burn through 5 yards of coal a winter then then the guy would drop off 180 bags? Geeze that would suck.

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u/HeyLittleTrain 8d ago

To burn in the fireplace

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u/Neutronpulse 8d ago

Do you not own a grill?

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u/Tall_olive 8d ago

I don't know about you, but I use charcoal(which is a man made product derived from wood) in my grill.

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u/Neutronpulse 8d ago

Fair enough. I didn't put much thought into that.

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u/tepsic7 8d ago edited 7d ago

For barbecue, I use in my grill.

Edit: My bad, I confused charcoal with coal. At least now I got to read up on the diffrence between them.

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u/Tall_olive 8d ago

You sure you don't mean charcoal? Which is entirely different and man made.

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u/ItsWillJohnson 8d ago

please do not eat foods cooked over burning coal. or be near burning coal. don't burn coal to begin with really.

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u/JasonGD1982 8d ago

Lol. Did he confuse charcoal with coal? Surely he isn't cooking hotdogs and hamburgers over a coal grill 🤣🤣🤣

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u/tepsic7 7d ago

Yup, my bad. I confused charcoal with coal.

At least now I got to read up on the diffrence between them.

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u/ChornWork2 8d ago

charcoal for bbq is made from wood (cooked without oxygen so chars), not derived from mined coal.

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u/Chess42 8d ago

Who tf uses coal in a grill?? Use charcoal like a normal person!

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u/ayriuss 8d ago

That's crazy. Ive never even seen coal in real life. Just charcoal. Its been illegal to burn here since before I was born.

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u/psysxet 8d ago

charcoal, not coalcoal, right?

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u/window-sil 8d ago

I mean in this clip we probably saw like ~$10 worth of coal mined. Two people paid for 90 seconds of work to generate $10 worth of coal aint bad.

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u/Longjumping_Act_9204 8d ago

I got a bag of coal for christmas once.

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u/Traveller7142 8d ago

What store sells bags of coal?

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u/BetterCranberry7602 8d ago

Tractor supply

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u/USAFmuzzlephucker 8d ago

Some people do still burn it at home. Several homes in my little town still burn coal for heat. It's a strangely welcome smell in the fall.

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u/777777thats7sevens 8d ago

My hardware store does

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u/fynn34 8d ago

I just had a conversation with ChatGPT about it, there’s different types of coal, some of which are worth more (up to 2-4X for steel types and stuff) and ultimately, it’s fairly compact so a cubic meter is about 1.1-1.5 metric tonnes, and in that perspective, a single miner could get 5-20 tonnes per day, which even factoring transportation could still be slightly profitable. If you are using open mines and heavy mining equipment you can get many many tonnes out at once

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u/rickane58 8d ago

"I just had a conversation with ChatGPT about it" is such a totally normal and human way to say it.

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u/fynn34 5d ago

Are you implying a bot would chat with ChatGPT? How would you say it?

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u/rickane58 5d ago

Well, a normal human wouldn't declare they've chatted with chatGPT, and IMO chatting with a generative AI to find out concrete information of any kind is asking to be presented with misinformation at best.

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u/hadrosaur 8d ago

i pay $11 for 50lb bags of rice coal, thats crushed sorted cleaned bagged and shipped. poor bastards

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

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u/Tall_olive 8d ago

Charcoal is a man made product derived from wood. Charcoal coolers don't use coal at all, according to a quick Google search anyways.