The US is awash in coal. Not just in the Appalachians and Rockies, but pretty much everywhere in between. And even further west.
So I’m wondering if all the states except Hawaii have (or had) coal deposits. I assume, based on its geology, that Hawaii does not. But what about the rest of the states? You’d think it would be easy to google, but I wasn’t able to find out if Delaware and Connecticut ever had a coal mine, although it seems that Massachusetts and Rhode Island both did. What about Florida? Can’t tell on that one either.
Well, just found part of my answer in a Straight Dope thread: Is there any coal in New England?, where they say there’s only coal in Massachusetts and RI. Should have kept googling before posting, I guess.
Coal reserves would be coal that could be extracted profitably with today’s technology and at today’s prices. There could easily be known coal deposits that do not count as reserves.
According to a 1994 report by the US Department of Energy, only 38 states have coal deposits, not all of which have actually mined it. Florida and Hawaii are not among the states listed as having produced coal, though the report doesn’t say one way or another whether they’re among the 38 states where coal exists.
Oh, and I just found Florida’s profile on the National Mining Association. It claims that there are 471 coal miners and 16 support workers in Florida, who collectively earn $24 million, and that coal mining in Florida directly contributes $33 million to GDP. However, it also lists Florida’s coal production as 0 million tons. So I think one or more of the following must be true:
[ul]
[li]Coal is mined in Florida, but the output is so little that, measured in millions of tons, it rounds off to 0.[/li][li]There are coal miners or coal companies based in Florida (whose numbers and income are reported on the NMA profile for Florida), but mining is carried out in other states (and production is reported on the NMA profile for those states, not the NMA profile for Florida).[/li][li]The NMA numbers are erroneous.[/li][/ul]
There is a similar profile for Hawaii which counts 10 coal miners but no direct income or production.
Yes, there could be (I wouldn’t say “easily” - the overall geological history of Florida makes it unlikely). I don’t know of any, though. There’s a lot of peat, though, so give it time
The peat could also account for the coal miners in Florida. I could see a coal company investigating the possibility of harvesting peat, and sending a small number of workers to check it out, maybe even setting up a pilot program to do it. The people who would be doing this would be coal miners by profession, and the industry they’d be working in would be the coal industry, but they’d still be harvesting zero coal.
Yep. Despite what you may have been taught in high school science, diamonds don’t form from coal.
Diamonds form in the Earth’s mantle, though they can also form in subduction zones. Most of the diamonds mined commercially were formed in the mantle and were brought to the surface in volcanic eruptions.
Diamonds can also form in asteroid and large meteor impact sites.
Given that Hawaii is made up entirely of volcanic rocks, it’s very unlikely it could have any coal deposits. However, it does import coal from Indonesia for a power plant. I’m going to guess that the mining jobs are somehow related to that imported coal rather than mining coal in Hawaii.
Or maybe the miners are seasonal workers who go out of state to work. Is coal mining ever a seasonal activity? Maybe in the far north it’s done only when the weather permits it—either in the summer, when the ground is exposed and unfrozen, or in the winter, when ice roads over bogs permit access to remote deposits.
My quick glance says NMA has ‘coal mine workers’ in every state except Maine, Nebraska and Rhode Island (see the previously linked thread, at least Rhode Island actually was at one time an industrial era coal producing state). The EIA by my quick perusal gives one or more coal mines in only 25 states.
Among your three explanations I tend to think it’s not tiny coal production or outright errors. Your second reason is probably one. One could imagine miners who have a primary residence in FL and commute during the week to northern AL mines for example. Others explanations I could think of would be perhaps coal terminal workers are roped in as coal miners because the United Mine Workers sometimes represents them. FL receives a lot of coal by water mainly by barge from within the US. And also it might include people collecting UMW pensions, which arguably wouldn’t be altogether bogus in showing the industry’s impact beyond the states where coal is actually mined.
Determining which states ever mined coal is trickier, but I don’t doubt the EIA’s stats for which states do now.
