“Among the materials that are dug because they are useful,” the ancient Greek scientist Theophrastus wrote around 300 B.C., “those known as coals are made of earth, and once set on fire, they burn like charcoal…used by those who work in metals.” Coal has long been valued as a heating element and energy source. Today, it is the most plentiful fuel in the fossil family, representing a major source of electrical generation to the world.
In the Americas, the Aztecs from the 14th through 16th centuries were the first documented people to use coal as a heating fuel. While records for Wyoming do not indicate if American Indians used coal, early trappers were known to have found it on the ground and used it for fuel.
The first record of a coal deposit in Wyoming was in 1843 by the second Frémont Expedition. Lt. John C. Frémont, guided by Kit Carson, set out to explore routes to Oregon with the intent to gather, publish and promote new settlement in the West. In August 1843, a few days after crossing the Green River in what’s now western Wyoming, Frémont noted coal was displayed “in rabbit burrows in a kind of gap” in hills through which the travelers passed before camping late one afternoon.
Sixty years later, the area of Frémont’s discovery became the site of the coal camp of Cumberland, south of Kemmerer in what is now in the Rocky Mountain West consisted of company towns like Cumberland, in which everything – the general store, workers’ houses, schools and public halls—was all owned by the coal company.
The Raynolds Expedition in 1859 recorded the second known discovery of coal in the state in the Powder River Basin – the location of the most prolific coal fields in the nation today. Geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden, later director of the U.S. Geological Survey, was with Raynolds on the 1859 expedition and came across what he said were “true lignite beds” covering the region from Platte County to Pumpkin Buttes in what is now Campbell County. Lignite is a low-grade coal.
Commercial mining for coal in Wyoming began with the arrival of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1867. Coal was used to fuel steam engines to power locomotives. It was the primary source of fuel for trains until diesel engines replaced the locomotives in the mid-20th century. The U.P.’s route across what soon became Wyoming Territory depended on two main factors, topography and plentiful coal. The route connected the major mines of Carbon, Rock Springs and Almy, Wyoming, near Evanston.
The first mines were owned by the Wyoming Coal and Mining Company, which leased the land from the railroad. The company mined the coal and sold it to the railroad for a profit. In 1874, the government terminated the agreement between the two companies. Consequently, the Union Pacific Coal Company was formed as the Union Pacific Coal Department by the Union Pacific Railroad, with the railroad effectively taking over the mines. U.P. Coal Company then had a monopoly on coal production in the territory and used the coal primarily for its railroad operations.
Carbon, on the UP line southwest of Medicine Bow, was founded by Thomas Wardell in 1868 and incorporated in 1890. Seven mines were worked in Carbon and the town supported a population of about 3,000 people.
In 1899 the railroad was relocated to Hanna, just northwest of Carbon, to avoid climbing a steep grade. The Hanna mine then became the main supplier of coal for train locomotives. The mines and the town of Carbon were finally abandoned in 1902 by the U.P. Coal Company. All that remains of the town is the cemetery, dugouts that served as houses on the hillside, and a few of the sandstone walls and foundations from the buildings that made up this once flourishing coal town.
The Carbon cemetery, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, located just north of the town, includes the graves of many members of the Carbon community. It also contains the graves of some of the miners killed in an explosion in one of the Hanna mine on June 30, 1903, which took the lives of 169 men. A pair of explosions in 1908 killed 59 more. The accidents decimated the town’s male population and left hundreds of orphaned children and widows.
“The Carbon cemetery is a place that preserves the lives of these people in the landscape where they lived and worked,” says Nancy Anderson, curator of the Hanna Basin Museum. The museum protects the records and artifacts of Carbon and Hanna coal miners and their families from that era, including the records of Hanna’s mine disasters.
Coal mining at Rock Springs, 140 miles west of Carbon, also began in the late 1860s to supply coal to the U.P. During the next century, more than 100 million tons of coal came from Rock Springs mines. The last mine closed in 1963, when Rock Springs had turned to other extractive industries such as oil and natural gas.
Coal mining in the early days was a hard, dangerous job. Thousands of Wyoming miners lost their lives from explosions and fires. More than 300 miners died in disasters between 1886 and 1924. Black lung disease, from long exposure to coal dust, also plagued miners. Most of these dangers were connected with miners working in cramped mine shafts and larger underground rooms that could quickly fill with deadly gas.
Since the early mining disasters Wyoming has made significant strides to improve mine safety in the state. In 1886 the Wyoming Territorial Legislature, convening by chance just days after another major disaster at Almy, passed new mine safety laws. The new office of the State Mine Inspector was charged with inspecting every coal mine in the state once every three months.
In the early 1900s, prompted by so many accidents in the previous decades, the State Geologist was granted the authority to examine or inquire into any mine or mill in regard to worker safety; any accident was to be investigated. Other safety measures included a law establishing a uniform code of bell warning signals for use in the mines.
Union representatives took the initiative and spoke up publicly to protest mining disasters, insisting on more compensation for dependents of miners killed. Labor unions attracted new members by promising to seek greater safety. Safety features such as underground ventilation systems and rock dusting—a process using crushed limestone to dilute the explosive nature of coal dust—have provided miners with better protection.
Today, mining operations are much safer, especially in Wyoming where nearly all the coal now mined—at 17 out of 18 coal mines currently in production—comes from strip mines on the earth’s surface. Since 1978, the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has overseen safety and worker protection at mines throughout the United States. In 2012, MSHA reported 19 coal miners in the nation had died in on-the-job accidents, the second lowest number ever recorded.
But even with increased safety measures, surface and underground mining both remain dangerous. Surface mining requires constant safety checks of log books, powder magazines used for blasting and the major equipment used to load coal and haul it away.
Underground mining —far more dangerous—requires constant checks on air quality, roof integrity and fire danger. Rescue of miners trapped underground can be extremely difficult. Explosions are also a risk; twenty-nine miners were killed in 2010 in an explosion at West Virginia’s underground Upper Big Branch Mine, owned by Massey Energy.
Safety is the most important concern with regard to coal mining. Nationally,
since 1977 the U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration
(MSHA) has governed the health and welfare of the safety of miners. MSHA sets national
standards through regulation to ensure safe operations at both surface and
underground coal mines, and oversees activities such as approving specialized
mining equipment, determining the quality of rock dust, conducting mine methane
monitoring, detection of thermal events in underground mines, and worker safety.
Mining often involves extremely difficult and hazardous working conditions and
MSHA has the responsibility to ensure that mining is conducted in a safe
environment using safe equipment. New technological advances in radio
communications, as well as methane detection in underground mines or liberation
methods have recently made underground mining a much safer work place.
After 1874, as we have seen, the Union Pacific held a monopoly on coal production in Wyoming. Late that year, the U.S. secretary of the Interior noted that U.P. was able to sell Wyoming coal, delivered in Omaha, Nebr. for the modern equivalent of $9 per ton, while charging other coal companies $10 per ton just to ship their freight.
U.P. Coal Company officials also held a tight rein on worker pay. In 1875, company executives cut the work rate paid to miners by one-fifth, but kept charging the same coal prices to its buyers. When the miners went on strike, company officials replaced them with Chinese laborers who worked for less. This led to a long series of strikes, and eventually to murder.
In 1885, the Rock Springs Massacre made national headlines. The miners’ resentment of the U.P. Coal Company and its pay cuts, combined with rumors that Colorado miners were to receive pay raises, resulted in a major uprising. Members of a union called the Knights of Labor burned the homes of 74 Chinese families, and 28 people were killed. The Chinese fled toward Green River and U.P. trainmen rescued them as they fled along the tracks. Federal troops were called in to restore order and eventually the Chinese returned to work.
During the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, coal became the dominant worldwide energy source. In Wyoming, as in other places with growing industry, coal was cheap and abundant. It was much easier to mine coal than to cut wood for fuel. Hotter coal fires brought major changes in the metal industries. Demand grew for the products of the new technologies fueled by coal. Converting coal into clean natural gas was also first considered at this time; cities such as Boston used large ovens to turn coal into gas that fueled streetlights and lamps in homes.
In the second half of the 19th century, more uses for coal were discovered. Civil War weapons factories converted to coal. By 1875, coke, a hotter fuel refined from coal, replaced charcoal as the primary fuel for iron blast furnaces used to make steel. Smith’s Fork in what is now Lincoln County, a long-time trading post for trappers and Indians, changed its name to Cokeville because of large deposits of coke-suitable coal nearby.
A 1907 report by the Wyoming State Geological Survey (WSGS) noted, “coal was the principal mineral product of Wyoming, constantly increasing in volume” as the railroad’s demand for the product grew. According to the report, the quality ranged from high-quality coal from the famous Kemmerer and Rock Springs coal seams, to low-grade lignites found near a dozen towns in Wyoming.
Growth in coal production spiked again during World War II, when national demand soared for Wyoming’s coal and other natural resources.
In the 1960s, Wyoming’s first coal-fired electric-power generation plants were built, establishing a reliable local market for coal. In the 1970s, demand boomed for low-sulfur Powder River Basin coal after new amendments to the Clean Air Act began regulating sulfur emissions. Most of the coal from the Powder River Basin is shipped by rail to power plants in 34 states.
Wyoming’s strip mines increased enormously in size in the 1970s. Today they represent the largest scale of coal mining anywhere in the world. Wyoming is home to nine of the nation’s 10 largest coal mines, and coal in Wyoming is mined at a rate of 12 tons per second. Fifty to 70 coal trains per day carry coal out of the Powder River Basin. The trains are generally 110 to 140 cars long, carry 15,000 to 20,000 tons of coal each, and stretch more than 1.5 miles along the tracks.
Wyoming produces around 400 million tons per year—nearly 40 percent of the nation’s coal.
Mine reclamation is the process of restoring land that has been mined to a
natural or approved economically usable purpose. Although the process of mine
reclamation occurs once mining has been completed; the preparation and planning
of mine reclamation activities occur prior to a mine being permitted or mining
disturbance starts.
As the nation’s leading coal production state, Wyoming regulators also lead the
country in reclaiming and restoring the largest acreage of coal mine related
disturbance. The large surface mines in the Powder River Basin are home to coal
deposits of more than 100 feet thick. Reclaiming these large areas to recreate
their original topography and drainage patterns requires major efforts with
years of modeling, planning, and earthmoving prior to achieving the approved
final post-mine surface.
In 1977, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMRCA) established
requirements for the permitting of surface and underground coal mining on lands
in Wyoming, lands with federal leases or overlying federal coal. SMRCA was
passed with specific criteria for determining whether lands were unsuitable for
coal mining, and establishing parameters for the reclamation of lands disturbed
by coal mines. The Office of Surface Mine Reclamation & Enforcement
oversees all mining and reclamation activities at all U.S. coal mines, and
following OSMRE’s approval of the Wyoming Environmental Quality Act (WEQA) and
its regulations, this effort has been delegated to the Wyoming Department of
Environmental Quality (DEQ). The active mine reclamation program is operated by
the Land Quality Division (LQD)
and the inactive abandoned mine program is operated by the Abandoned Mine Land
(AML). The LQD is responsible for the enforcement of the regulatory requirements for
mining and reclamation activities on all coal mines in Wyoming. LQD oversees
mine permitting and licensing for both surface and underground mining
activities, for both coal and non-coal mining operations. As required by SMCRA,
as well as the Wyoming Environmental Quality Act, and Wyoming regulations, LQD
holds reclamation bonds for each mine to ensure satisfactory reclamation
activities are completed after mining has ceased. The Abandoned Mine Lands
protection program provides safeguards for public safety on abandoned mine sites
that do not necessarily fall within the bounds of SMRCA.
Most of the lands that coal mines operate on are public lands administered by the
Bureau of Land Management (BLM),
under the U.S. Department of the Interior. This federal agency oversees 17.5
million acres of public lands in Wyoming and 40.7 million acres of federal
mineral estates. Under the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 coal officially became a
leased commodity. On federal lands, mineral and coal development is conducted
through approval by the BLM. The BLM actively holds lease sales and
lease-by-application processes, sets standards for their mine inspections, and
provides coal or mineral production verification, logical mining units as well
as other important mining parameters. The BLM in Wyoming is a national leader in
establishing rules and regulations for large surface mining operations to ensure
fair leasing and along with MSHA, safe coal mining operations in the state.
Coal is also part of the global debate on global warming and greenhouse gas
emissions. According to the EPA, concerns about limiting greenhouse gas
emissions and climate change inevitably point to fossil fuels as the primary
source for anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Coal-fired power plants
are assumed to be the largest point sources for CO2 emissions worldwide. For
more than 40 years state and federal legislation (Clean Air Act 1970) has been
passed to clean up emissions from coal-fired power plants with regard to sulfur
oxides (SOx), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and particulate matter. In the future, new
Mercury and Air Toxics regulations will limit mercury and other emissions from
power plants. Wyoming coal is naturally very low in mercury, arsenic, and sulfur
and may still be mined despite these new regulations. Wyoming coal will still
remain an important constituent for electricity generation in the future.
Additional information is available on the U.S. EPA website.
Additional Information