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Coal mining is an industry in transition in the United States. Production in 2019 was down 40% from the peak production of 1,171.8 million short tons (1,063 million metric tons) in 2008. Employment of 43,000 coal miners is down from a peak of 883,000 in 1923. [1] Generation of electricity is the largest user of coal, being used to produce 50% ...
Coal mining. Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground or from a mine. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from iron ore and for cement production.
At the start of the 19th century, coal mining was almost all bituminous coal. In 1810, 176,000 short tons of bituminous coal, and 2,000 tons of anthracite coal, were mined in the United States. American coal mining grew rapidly in the early 1820s, doubling or tripling every decade. Anthracite mining overtook bituminous coal mining in the 1840s ...
The U.S. Bureau of Mines was created in 1910 to investigate accidents, advise industry, conduct production and safety research, and teach courses in accident prevention, first aid, and mine rescue. The Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Acts of 1969 and 1977 set further safety standards for the industry.
The following table lists the coal mines in the United States that produced at least 4,000,000 short tons of coal.. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), there were 853 coal mines in the U.S. in 2015, producing a total of 896,941,000 short tons of coal.
The coal industry asserts that surface mining techniques, such as mountaintop removal, are safer for miners than sending miners underground. [24] Proponents argue that in certain geologic areas, MTR and similar forms of surface mining allow the only access to thin seams of coal that traditional underground mining would not be able to mine. MTR ...
The history of coal mining goes back thousands of years, with early mines documented in ancient China, the Roman Empire and other early historical economies. It became important in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was primarily used to power steam engines, heat buildings and generate electricity.
The number of coal mining jobs in the region remained steady from 2000 to 2010, but declined by 37% between 2011 and 2015. [3] Less production is responsible for much of this job loss, but improved mining techniques like mountain-top removal also contributed. [3]