The two ways by which coal in greatest volume can be saved are the
discovery of the method by which more power can be taken from the ton
and the discovery of what kind of coal is best fitted for any particular
use.
It has been everyone's business to save coal, hence.... The railroads
have experimented with some success. They get perhaps 10 per cent of the
heat energy from a ton shoveled beneath the locomotive boiler, 10 per
cent of the total in the ton. They use one-quarter of all the coal
mined. Next to labor this is the greatest expense which our railroads
have. This shows how great the problem is to them. Some have adopted a
system of paying a bonus for the greatest distance made on a given
quantity of a given coal. But this laudable effort has not met with the
cooperation that would be expected from the firemen, for reasons that go
far afield. Industries, especially those which generate electric power,
have made similar effort to gain from their fuel its greatest
potentiality, and with varying success. We can overlook the stoking of
the domestic furnace as a national concern, for the amount of coal used
in this way amounts to not more than 17 per cent of the national coal
bill, and this whole charge could be saved, it is estimated, by giving
care to the 75 per cent of our coal which is burned under boilers to
make steam. Here there is a maximum figure of 13 per cent of the energy
of the coal put into harness, and the average is less than 10 per cent,
even in the larger plants.
In one establishment visited by the fuel engineers of this department
during the war a preventable waste of 40,000 tons a year was discovered.
By changes in the admission of air to the furnaces and in the "baffling"
of the boilers the engineers of the Bureau of Mines are confident that
they have been able to increase the economy of coal in the ships of the
Emergency Fleet Corporation by 16 per cent, making 6 pounds of coal do
the work of 7. If such a percentage of economy could be generally
effected it would mean the saving of as much coal as France and Italy
together will need in this year of their greatest distress.