RIVALS OF COAL
Until recently it has been taken for granted that there was plenty of
coal. The industrial revolution rose and triumphed on the theory of an
inexhaustible supply. Mines were opened casually here and there and such
coal as was easy to get was taken from the reserves which were supposed
to be bottomless. And men were poured into the mines, thousands in
excess of the need. They were as plentiful as the coal. Because of these
two things--the vast amount of coal and the cheap and abundant man
power--the coal industry came through the industrial revolution which it
created, without being itself revolutionized.
Now the coal supply is large, but it is not by any means unlimited. No
one can increase it. There is no way of manufacturing coal. The
limitations of the supply were fixed by the geographical revolution.
Twenty million years ago all the coal we have or shall have was packed
away in the ribs of the earth in seams varying from sixty feet to the
thickness of a blade of grass. It is estimated that we still have in the
world more than seven thousand billion tons distributed as follows:
North America 5,073,431,000,000
Asia 1,279,586,000,000
Europe 784,190,000,000
Australasia 170,410,000,000
Africa 57,839,000,000
South America 32,097,000,000
-----------------
Total 7,397,553,000,000
This seems like a vast amount which even wasteful production could
hardly exhaust in thousands of years. But much of the supply is of such
low grade as to be inefficient as a steam producer, much of it occurs at
such deep levels or so remote from the centers of population as to be
commercially unprofitable to mine. Mr. Floyd W. Parsons, formerly editor
of the _Coal Age_, has warned us that "each year now witnesses the
exhaustion of a number of high-grade coal areas. Far more mines
producing better grades of coal are being worked out than there are new
mines commencing to produce.... Operating companies are now going over
their acreage, taking out pillars and working low-grade thin seams." And
Mr. D. B. Rushmore, chief engineer in the power and mining department of
the General Electric Company, calculates that if our coal consumption
were to continue to increase at the apparently normal rate of seven per
cent each year, the life of our known reserves would be as follows:
Eastern District, which includes the most accessible and
best quality of our fuel 59 years
Eastern, Central, and Southern Districts 65 years
Entire U. S. and Alaska, two-thirds of this being low-grade
coals and lignites 84 years
These figures are based upon the appraisals of the U. S. Geological
Survey. They include coal in veins as shallow as fourteen inches, all
coal whose ash content does not exceed thirty per cent, and all known
deposits within six thousand feet of the surface. They are based on the
optimistic assumption that two-thirds of the coal in the mines will be
brought to the surface, a considerably higher recovery than has hitherto
been achieved. Mr. Rushmore concludes that the evidence points
unmistakably to an approaching scarcity of high-grade coal and
increasingly higher prices.
One of the greatest single causes of waste and increased prices is our
antiquated system of distributing the energy contained in coal. It is
estimated that every hundred tons of coal shipped involves the burning
of ten tons in railroad locomotives. There is no longer any technical
justification for transporting power in the enormously bulky form of
coal when it could be much more efficiently distributed by pipe and wire
in the form of gas and electricity. Even were it not enormously
inefficient, there are definite physical limits beyond which the steam
haulage of coal in bulk cannot be increased--certain bottle necks like
that through which the Lehigh River flows, narrow edges like that along
the Susquehanna, where no more slow puffing trains can go toiling up and
down the slippery grades, because there is no more room for them on the
tracks. Already the load upon the antiquated steam railroads is too
heavy for them to bear, so that the system of transportation breaks down
under every peak load and in every crisis such as that induced by the
war.
Moreover our methods of consumption are incredibly wasteful. Mr. George
Otis Smith, Director of the U. S. Geological Survey, has prepared a
chart showing that of every two thousand pounds of coal, six hundred
pounds are lost in mining, one hundred and twenty-six pounds are
consumed at the mine and en route to the boiler room, four hundred and
forty-six pounds are lost in gases going up the stack, fifty-one pounds
are lost by radiation and fifty-one in the ash pit, six hundred and
fifty pounds are lost in converting heat energy into mechanical energy,
and only seventy-six pounds out of the two thousand are actually
converted into productive mechanical energy. After two hundred years of
mechanical invention, we are still stupidly content to dissipate
ninety-six per cent of the labor-saving value of coal.
But even if the coal supply were unlimited, if every year a new crop
grew to take the place of the one consumed, even if it were physically
possible for the railroads to carry an ever-increasing load, the miners
are not willing to get it out on the same old basis of low wages, high
hazards, and demoralizing irregularity of employment. Man power has
changed its own status. In 1919 the wages of common labor at the mines
were fixed at seven and a half dollars a day. As wages go, this would
have meant a reasonably fair standard of living if work in the mines had
been steady. But during the last thirty years the mines have been idle
an average of ninety-three days in every three hundred and eight working
days in the year, and during 1921 the miner was fortunate who got as
much as two days of work in the week, that is, fifteen dollars a week
and seven hundred and eighty dollars a year. The hazards of mining have
increased. The U. S. Bureau of Mines tells us that while in 1890 the
death rate of coal miners was 2.15 for every thousand men employed, in
1914 the rate had increased to 3.19. In 1890 between three and four
miners were killed for every million tons mined; in 1914 between four
and five miners were killed for every million tons. Labor is no longer
content to be sacrificed in order to put an increasing stream of cheap
coal into the fire boxes of engines that waste nine-tenths and more of
their labor and so deprive them of the possibility of the good life
according to American standards. They are taking stock and evaluating
themselves. Some of their demands, like the six-hour day, five days a
week, are socially unwise, but they represent a just protest against
the demoralizing intermittency of employment. The demand is simply an
effort to spread the actual hours of work evenly throughout the year.
Already the conditions imposed by the unions in the interest of a
reasonable standard of living act as a strong differential against the
mining of difficult seams and poor grades of coal. They are rapidly
getting into a position where they can dictate the conditions under
which they will hazard their lives underground. And these are not
conditions which the coal industry with its competitive overdevelopment,
its load of parasite railroads, sales companies, company-owned houses
and stores, its inefficient operating methods, and particularly its
antiquated energy-producing equipment on which it must pay heavy
interest, is prepared to meet.
Because the supply of coal cannot much longer meet the cumulatively
wasteful demands upon it; because the railroad system is breaking down
under the increased bulk of coal to be transported; because the miners
are increasingly insisting that the reward of their hazardous labor must
give them a fair chance of the good life according to American standards
of living; and because the community which must be served cannot
indefinitely pay the price of inefficiency and waste, the present order
in the coal industry is drawing to a close.
The technicians have seen this impending change for a long time. Through
their help the industrial revolution might have reorganized the coal
industry decades ago under the pressure of an increasing demand for
power, if it had not been held off by new discoveries of petroleum and
natural gas. Petroleum, which had been used in a small way in many
countries for centuries, first became an international commodity when
Roumania began to ship it in 1857. It took on great industrial
importance when the first American well, the famous Drake well in Oil
Creek, Pennsylvania, was sunk in 1859. But in 1860 the world's total
recorded production was less than five hundred and ten thousand barrels,
of which five hundred thousand barrels are credited to the United
States. By 1917 the world output had risen to nearly four hundred and
fifty million barrels, of which the United States furnished nearly four
hundred million.
The coal and petroleum industries are closely interrelated. Coal and
petroleum are largely interchangeable as sources of energy. Both can be
used for fuel under boilers in their crude state, although crude oil is
the more efficient; both provide an illuminating oil for use in lamps,
although kerosene is so much better than coal oil as to have driven it
out of the market; both furnish a satisfactory fuel for the
internal-combustion engine, although benzol, a coal derivative, has not
yet been recovered in sufficient quantities to make it a competitor of
gasoline; both provide a fuel gas, although that derived from petroleum
has the greater heat value. Ton for ton, petroleum has every advantage
over coal, and there is every reason why it should drive coal out of its
preeminent position in industry, except one--the limitations of the
supply.
For petroleum is far cheaper to produce, not only in terms of money, but
in terms of human effort and life. Compare with the labor and hazard of
opening and working a coal mine Pogue and Gilbert's description of the
opening of an oil well.
"Drilling an oil well is commonly done by means of a heavy string of
tools, suspended at the end of a cable and given a churning motion by a
walking beam rocked by a steam engine.... The steel tools, falling
under their own weight, literally punch their way to the depth desired."
The usual custom is for four men working two twelve-hour shifts to sink
a well. Their work is to keep the engine that operates the drill
running, to watch the operation, and to stoke the engine. The only
danger is when the time has come to "shoot" the well. This is done only
if the oil does not flow naturally when the oil-bearing strata are
reached. The "shooting" consists in dropping a "go devil" upon canisters
of nitroglycerine to blow out a cavity at the bottom in which oil may
collect. If the charge explodes before it reaches the bottom of the
well, it may blow back and wreck the derrick, and the timbers and
"bull-wheel" may fall upon the men. This danger, which can be obviated
by the simple process of the men going away until after the charge has
exploded, is practically the only one connected with drilling for
petroleum, except for the incidental danger which all handling of high
explosives necessarily involves.
A well costs only about one-tenth as much per foot of descent as a mine
shaft; and it can be put down in much quicker time. When it is once in
contact with the oil, operating expenses are trifling, for in many cases
the oil reaches the surface under natural gas pressure, and in others it
has merely to be pumped. There are not the expenses for breaking rock,
timbering, or haulage, which are common in coal mining.
So that in addition to being a better fuel than coal to burn under a
steam boiler, petroleum mining is as healthful and safe an occupation as
can be well found in contrast with the extremely dangerous work of the
coal miner, and it can be far more quickly and more cheaply got out of
the ground.
It has other advantages.
Coal, bituminous coal especially, is so bulky and so liable to
spontaneous combustion that it is difficult to store. Petroleum, on the
contrary, can be easily and satisfactorily stored in iron tanks which,
standing about like great cheese boxes, are characteristic of the
oil-producing country. Added to the advantage of easy storage is the
much greater one of easy transportation. Unlike coal, the crude
petroleum supply of the country makes no demand upon the railroads. Only
under exceptional circumstances and for short distances is it hauled
about in tank cars. It has its own independent system of pipe lines,
after the manner of a great water supply. These systems connect the oil
wells with the refineries, the markets, and the seaports.
The pipe lines are ample to distribute the current production of oil. It
is these pipe lines that have not only made the petroleum industry
absolutely independent of the railroads, but through the low cost of
their operation have lowered the cost of petroleum products. They have
also made it possible to establish oil refineries near the points of
consumption and have united widely separated fields.
For all these reasons--because it is a more efficient fuel under steam
boilers; because it can be produced more cheaply; because the work of
mining it is easy and the danger is slight; and because having an
independent transportation system of its own it makes no demand on the
already overburdened railroads--petroleum might have superseded coal as
the power that rules industry if there had been enough of it. Even as it
is, petroleum has been able to meet a large part of the demand for fuel
and so stand between the coal industry and the reorganization hanging
over it.
But we have been, if possible, more prodigal in our exploitation of our
petroleum resources than of coal. There was an immediate market for all
the petroleum that could be produced. The well-owner's chief anxiety was
lest his neighbor, whose well tapped the same underground reservoir,
should get the oil out before he did. So the exploiters of petroleum
rushed on their quarry with an avidity never equalled by the exploiters
of coal. While approximately one-half of the coal has been left in the
ground through the eagerness of the owners to beat each other to market,
from seventy to ninety per cent of the petroleum in the various fields
has been lost from the same cause. And industry has seemed to take it
for granted that because petroleum was being produced so rapidly, there
was an unlimited supply. In 1916, many plants shifted from coal to fuel
oil, because of the inability of the railroads to deliver coal. We have
developed an oil-burning navy and are rapidly developing an oil-burning
merchant marine. Ships and factory furnaces are competing with the
internal-combustion engines of millions of automobiles and the hungry
lamps of the countryside for the diminishing reserves of petroleum.
Already the supply of crude petroleum is hard pressed by the demand for
fuel oil. Already approximately one-half of the original petroleum
supply of the United States is gone. In 1918, 460,721,000 barrels were
taken, while it was estimated that 6,730,000,000 barrels remained in the
ground, and the production during the two subsequent years was
approximately 400,000,000 barrels annually. The petroleum reserve,
converting barrels into tons, amounts to only 2/1000 of our reserves of
coal. If we stopped mining coal tomorrow and let American petroleum take
its place, all our petroleum resources would be exhausted in about
fifteen months.
And even if the supply of petroleum were far less limited than the
experts estimate it to be, even if there were enough of it to last for
many decades to come, the fact that it is practically the one lubricant
of the industrial world makes it a social crime to burn it as a
substitute for coal. Without it, every railroad wheel would run hot and
stop; the great turbines in our ships and modern power plants move on
bearings that are smothered in petroleum oil. And for petroleum as a
lubricant there is no commercially available substitute.
Closely associated with petroleum and originally derived from it, is
natural gas. There is no way of telling how great the supply of this has
been in the past, how much there is in reserve, or what the present
outflow is, because the waste of natural gas has been and is notorious.
We do know, however, that the per capita consumption in 1915, according
to the U. S. Geological Survey, was approximately four times the
consumption of artificial gas, and seven times that of the by-product
coke-oven gas, and that its average price to the consumer was sixteen
cents a thousand cubic feet as against ninety-one cents for artificial
gas and ten cents for coke-oven gas. About one-third of the natural gas
is used for domestic purposes, about two-thirds is used for manufacture.
It is conservatively estimated that 100,000,000 gallons of gasoline can
be recovered from it annually and it is the primary source of the lamp
black from which all the printers' ink in present use is made. The
supply of natural gas in reserve is not calculable, but since most of
the wells show a diminished flow, it is believed to be on the way to
exhaustion.
Although the supplies of oil and gas have supplemented coal for half a
century and protected the coal industry from the same sort of economic
pressure which has forced reorganization upon most other enterprises,
the time is at hand when they can no longer do so.
The imaginative appeal of hydroelectric power has led many people to
hope that water-power electricity would come to the aid of coal and
possibly replace it. But Mr. Charles P. Steinmetz, of the General
Electric Company, tells us that the total available water power of the
United States has been variously estimated at from fifty to one hundred
million horse-power, that is, from one-sixth to one-third of the
horse-power equivalent of our present annual coal production. He has
gone further and calculated the maximum possible value of all water
power beyond which the ultimate skill of invention could never possibly
go. If every raindrop which falls anywhere in the United States,
allowing only for the amount of water needed by agriculture and the loss
due to seepage and evaporation, were collected and all the power which
it could develop in its journey to the sea were efficiently utilized,
the resultant energy would amount to just about the same as the total
which we get out of our present coal consumption for all purposes. Water
power--hydroelectric energy--can never replace coal.
The waste of both petroleum and gas has been largely due to the
unrestrained acquisitive instinct seeking quick wealth in response to
the cry of the steam engine for more and more fuel. They were drafted
into service because they could do the work of coal and do it more
efficiently. But their diminishing supply makes it impossible for them
longer to stave off the impending technical revolution in the coal
industry. The miners are growing restive under the evils of intermittent
employment, uncertain income, and demoralizing conditions of living. The
public begins to rebel against irregularity of supply and ruinously high
prices. The antiquated transportation system creaks and staggers under a
load which the advance of technical science makes it unnecessary for it
longer to carry.
All these, taken together with the still-increasing demand for power to
drive on production and pile up a surplus on which to base an advancing
civilization, are forcing a new technical revolution upon the coal
industry.