310 



FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



June 



state where this precious fuel exists ; and 

 why has it not been done? Let the answer 

 be found in the history of my state, where 

 the waste of natural gas has been exceeded 

 only by that of our sister state of Penn- 

 sylvania. 



For ten years your speaker has appealed 

 in his official capacity as State Geologist to 

 the Legislature of West Virginia to put 

 some check upon this frightful waste of our 

 State's most valuable resource. Three pa- 

 triotic Governors, including our present 

 able executive, Governor Dawson, have in 

 every biennial message besought the Legis- 

 lative branch to end this criminal destruc- 

 tion by appropriate legislation, but some 

 unseen power greater than Governors or 

 Legislatures has so far thwarted and pal- 

 sied every effort to save the state and 

 the Nation this priceless heritage of fuel, 

 so that although five successive Legisla- 

 tures have attempted to deal with the ques- 

 tion in biennial sessions not an effective line 

 has yet been added to the statutes, and at 

 this very hour not less than 250 million 

 cubic feet of gas,_ and possibly more than 

 double that quantity, is daily being wasted 

 in this one state alone, 80 per cent of which 

 is easily and cheaply preventable. 



Why should a few oil producers in their 

 insane haste to get rich quickly, or add to 

 fortunes already swollen beyond safety to 

 the Republic be permitted thus to despoil 

 the entire country of its choicest fuel? 



But surely if men have thus permitted 

 the loss of our gaseous fuels, often because 

 they could neither see the substance itself 

 nor realize the extent of what they were 

 doing, certainly they would not be so waste- 

 ful of the solid fuels, the coal beds, some- 

 thing they can readily perceive and handle 

 and weigh. The record here is also one to 

 make every citizen of our Nation feel dis- 

 tressed and humiliated, for of the total 

 quantity of coal we have produced since 

 mining _ for commercial purposes began, 

 amounting to about five billion tons, at least 

 an equal amount and possibly more, has 

 been left in abandoned mines, and irretriev- 

 ably lost. You yvho are unacquainted with 

 the details of mining operations, and of the 

 ••structure of coal beds, will doubtless won- 

 der how such a vast loss of fuel could take 

 place. There are many causes for the ex- 

 istence of this enormous waste in the ex- 

 traction of coal. Let me enumerate a few 

 of them. 



First : The individual coal bed is not all 

 pure coal and this is especially true if it be 

 very thick. Some of it consists of layers of 

 sulphurous or bony coal, rich in carbon, it 

 is true, but containing more ash, sulphur, 

 or earthy material than first-class coal 

 should hold : hence the purchaser objects, 

 and refuses his patronage to the party who 

 sends him coal that is high in ash. "There 

 being no market for such coals, the opera- 

 tor Jeayes this kind of fuel unmined if it 

 be in either the roof or bottom of his coal 

 bed, and if it he interstratified with the 

 pure coal, as it frequently is, he simply 



throws it along with other mine refuse into 

 the gob heaps within the mine, or piles it 

 in the hillocks of culm containing shale, 

 clay, and other waste material at the en- 

 trance. 



The quantity of this impure coal varies 

 from 10 to 50 per cent in nearly every coal 

 bed, and it would possibly average 25 per 

 cent in all the mines of the country. Tliis 

 material is rich in carbon, both fixed and 

 volatile, and when utilized through the 

 agency of producer gas, and the gas engine, 

 will yield much more power than the same 

 weight of the best Cardiff or Pocahontas 

 coal when the steam engine is the agency 

 of conversion. Why should our great man- 

 ufacturing companies permit one-fourth of 

 our entire coal resources to be thus wasted 

 and permanently lost, when the researches 

 of the Technical Branch of the United 

 States Geological Survey have fully demon- 

 strated the practicability of converting these 

 impure coals into great sources of power? 

 If in all new installations provision were 

 made for the use of gas engines, a large 

 portion of these impure coals could be util- 

 ized, and our purer types of fuel preserved 

 for other purposes. 



Second : Ip the mining of coal it is nec- 

 essary to support the overlying strata over 

 large areas of the mine in order that the 

 coal may be even partially taken out, and 

 hence it is the common mining practice tem- 

 porarily to_ utilize about 50 per cent of the 

 solid coal itself, in the shape of supporting 

 pillars for the protection of roadways, air 

 courses, working rooms, etc. On account 

 of accidents, like falling roof rock, 

 "squeezes," "creeps," "crushes," mistakes in 

 mine engineering, bad roof, and other 

 causes, many of these huge pillars are fre- 

 quently submerged and surrounded with 

 broken rock material, and thus another 

 large portion of every coal bed, the quan- 

 tity varying from 10 to 50 per cent, is ut- 

 terly lost, so that approximately 25 per cent 

 more of the nation's coal resources is wast- 

 ed from these, largely preventable causes. 



With so per cent of our coal left in the 

 abandoned mines, from which it can never 

 be recovered, except at enormous expense, 

 one would think that the end had come to 

 wantjon destruction of our coal resources, 

 but not so. 



A third means and one of unknown ex- 

 tent has yet to be considered. Some of the 

 impure layers of coal may have a still 

 larger percentage of earthy matter, and then 

 they become^ partings of shale, the fossil 

 muds and soils borne into and spread over 

 the ancient peat bogs by the draining 

 streams of geologic time. These partings 

 vary in thickness from a few inches to 

 several feet. When thin, and not exceed- 

 ing 6 to 12 inches, the usual mining prac- 

 tice is to take them out and secure the coal, 

 but where they attain a thickness of 18 to 

 24 inches their removal entails too much 

 expense for the production of bituminous 

 coal under present commercial conditions, 

 and hence the parting is not removed and 



