Coal

Coal is the most common fossil fuels in the family, and it has the longest and perhaps most varied history. Coal has been used for heating since the cave man. Archaeologists have also found evidence that the Romans in England used it in the second and third century (100-200 AD).

In the 1700s, was the English that coal can produce a fuel that burned cleaner and hotter than wood charcoal. But it was much needed energy to operate the new technologies invented during the Industrial Revolution, which gave a real opportunity for coal to play its first role as a dominant global supplier of energy.

In North America, the Hopi Indians in 1300 in what is now the Southwest of coal used for cooking, heating and baking pottery, they are made of clay. Coal was later rediscovered in the U.S., as explorers of the 1673rd However, no commercial coal mines did not begin operation until the 1740s in Virginia.

The Industrial Revolution played an important role in expanding the use of coal. A man named James Watt invented the steam engine that made it possible for machines to perform work previously done by humans and animals. Mr. Watt, who used coal to produce steam to run its engine.

In the first half of the 1800s, the industrial revolution spread to U.S. steamships and steam railways were about to become the leading forms of transportation, and they used coal to fuel their boilers.

In the second half of the 1800s, was more use of coal found.

During the civil war, weapons factories had started to use coal. By 1875, Coke (which is

made of carbon) replaced coal as the primary fuel for iron blast furnaces to make steel.
Burning coal for electricity generation is a relative newcomer in the history of this fossil fuel. It was in the 1880s, when coal was first used to generate electricity for homes and factories.

Long after the homes were illuminated by electricity generated by coal, many of them continued to have stoves for heating, and some had kilns were fueled by coal.
Today we spend a lot of coal, primarily because we have a lot of it, and we know where it is in the U.S..

Coal Mining and Transportation:

A form of mining called "the long wall mining", using a rotating blade to shear the coal away from the underground seam.

In the centuries since early humans discovered that the black rocks they picked up on Earth would burn, we had to look for coal, which was hidden under the earth's surface. One of the areas, it was easiest to find, was how it went, as one of many layers of materials along the side of a hill.

Then we found we could follow the coal layer (seam) deeper and deeper into the ground. Some mines today in the U.S. may be close to 500 meters underground.

Mining is classified by the method needed to reach the coal seam. When coal is found close to the Earth's crust and remove the overlying layers of material is not too expensive, surface mining is used to remove the top layer of material and expose the coal.

If coal is found in layers far from the surface and underground mining is the preferred technique. Vertical or oblique holes ( "shafts") are cut to underground mining area of ventilation for workers and for transport of miners, equipment and coal. Common types of underground mining is drift, shaft, and slope mining methods.

In mine, coal, loaded in the small coal cars or on conveyor belts, which bears out of the mine, where large chunks of coal loaded onto trucks that take it to be crushed (small pieces of coal is easier to transport, cleaning, firewood, etc..).

The crushed coal is then sent by truck, ship, rail or barge. You may be surprised to know that coal can also be sent through pipelines. Crushed coal is mixed with oil or water (mixture called slurry) and sent via pipeline to an industrial user.