Coal Industry Flow Chart

By Ken Ward Jr.
Charleston Gazette “Coal Tattoo” blog
10:26 am, July 15, 2009


(click on image to enlarge)

What the heck is this? It’s a coal industry flow chart created by the good folks at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration. The Energy Collective post pointed out these interesting bits of information from the chart:

– The sheer size of the US annual coal consumption, over 1.1 billion short tons.

– The US supplies all of its own demand, with a slight export surplus. Given the US’s large reserves, and how often we’re called “the Saudi Arabia of coal”, and how the reserves of those two fuels have been questioned lately, it’s true.

– 92.9% of US coal consumption goes for electricity. Think the coal industry is worried about a push to reduce CO2 emissions from electricity generation, given the cost and difficulty of widely implementing CCS (carbon capture and sequestration)?

– The US residential sector still uses about 400,000 short tons of coal per year, presumably for heating.

The Energy Collective also included some other interesting information:

But wait, you must surely be thinking, how does all that coal get to all those power plants? Largely by rail, of course, and it’s a big chunk of the US railroad industry:

– According to the [US] Bureau of Transportation Statistics and this page, in 2002
coal accounted for 17% of all freight ton-miles (not just that traveling on railroads), for a total of 562 billion ton-miles.

– According to page 3 of this 2008 document [• small PDF] by the American Association of Railroads:

– Coal is the most important commodity carried by US railroads. In 2007, coal accounted for 44 percent of rail tonnage and 21 percent of rail revenue. …railroads handle more than two-thirds of all US coal shipments.

– A pie chart on the same page shows that the 21% of railroad revenue is the largest single source by a considerable margin.

Forty-four percent of all freight ton-miles??? Does anyone else here think the railroad industry has to be almost as unhappy over coal’s dim prospects as the mining companies are?Finally, and most obviously, there’s the environmental price we pay for burning that constant river of coal. In 2007 alone, the US emitted 2.16 billion metric tons of CO2 from just coal consumption.

Obviously, this flow chart is not an all-inclusive look at coal’s energy cycle. It doesn’t include toxic ash from coal-fired power plants, for example. What would a broader flow chart look like? Ideas?