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Study Calculates Cost of Mountaintop Coal Removal
KENT, Ohio -- To meet current U.S. coal demand through surface mining, an area of the Central Appalachians the size of Washington, D.C., would need to be mined every 81 days. That’s about 68 square miles -- or roughly an area equal to 10 city blocks mined every hour.
So reports a new study by scientists at Kent State University, Duke University and the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies.
A one-year supply of coal would require converting about 310 square miles of the Appalachian Mountains into surface mines. That’s sufficient to pollute some 2,300 kilometers of streams in the mountain chain and release enough carbon sequestered by disturbed trees and soils. That released carbon would offset all the greenhouse gases produced by 33,600 average U.S. single-family homes in a year, the authors say.
The study, published in the peer-reviewed online journal PLOS ONE, is “the first to put an environmental price tag on mountaintop removal coal,” said Brian Lutz, assistant professor of biogeochemistry at Kent State, who began the analysis as a postdoctoral research associate last year at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
While many studies have documented the severity of the impact of surface minings on local ecosystems, few have quantified the regionwide extent of the damage and provided the metrics needed to weigh the environmental costs of mountaintop mining against its economic benefits, Lutz noted. “This is a critical shortcoming since even the most severe impacts may be tolerated if we believe they are sufficiently limited in extent,” he said.
To help fill the data gap, the authors of the study used satellite images and historical county-by-county coal production data to measure the total amount of land area mined and coal removed in the Central Appalachian coalfields between 1985 and 2005. They found that cumulative coal production during those 20 years totaled 1.93 billion tons, or about two years’ worth of current U.S. coal demand. To access the coal, nearly 2,000 square kilometers of land was mined – an area close in size to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
The team calculated the average per-ton environmental costs of this activity by using previously reported assessments of the extent of stream impairment and loss of carbon sequestration potential associated with every hectare of land mined. “Given 11,500 tons of coal was produced for every hectare of land disturbed, we estimate 0.25 centimeter of stream length was impaired and 193 grams of potential carbon sequestration was lost for every ton of coal extracted,” said Emily Bernhardt, associate professor of biogeochemistry at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
That doesn’t sound like much until it’s put in perspective, she noted. “Based on the average carbon sequestration potential of formerly forested mine sites that have been reclaimed into predominantly grassland ecosystems, we calculate it would take around 5,000 years for any given hectare of reclaimed mine land to capture the same amount of carbon that is released when the coal extracted is burned for energy,” she pointed out.
“Even on those rare former surface mines where forest regrowth is achieved, it would still take about 2,150 years for the carbon sequestration deficit to be erased,” added Lutz, who earned his Ph.D. from Duke in 2011.
“This analysis shows that the extent of environmental impacts of surface mining practices is staggering, particularly in terms of the relatively small amount of coal that is produced,” said William Schlesinger, president of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. Schlesinger is James B. Duke professor emeritus of biogeochemistry and former dean of Duke’s Nicholas School. “Tremendous environmental capital costs are being incurred for only modest energy gains."
The team’s research can be found at this website.
Published by The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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