336 I. C. WHITE SHORTAGE OF COAL IN APPALACHIAN FIELD 



exhaustion of over 1,000 acres every month, of the year, because the best 

 mining engineers of Pennsylvania have succeeded in saving and utilizing 

 only 8.000 tons of coal to the acre, of the 12,000 to 15,000 that are pres- 

 ent in the Pittsburg vein. Hence, should there be no increase in produc- 

 tion over the present, this famous coal bed would be entirely exhausted 

 from the state of Pennsylvania within 80 to 90 years. But what reason 

 is there for not believing that every normal year will record its regular 

 increase, until in 10 to 12 years at most Pennsylvania will have doubled 

 her present output of Pittsburg coal ? West Virginia has only about the 

 same acreage of this great coal bed as Pennsylvania, while Ohio's entire 

 area will be practically gone in 25 years. Hence one can readily perceive 

 that, with only a century's supply at the present rate of mining and in 

 view of the greatly increased production which can not fail to come with 

 our growth in population, 50 years is a liberal estimate for the life of the 

 Pittsburg coal bed. The same causes will in approximately that time 

 exhaust all of the cheaply mined thin veins in the Allegheny series of 

 Pennsylvania, Ohio, and northern West Virginia, and Pittsburg's indus- 

 tries will have entered upon the expensive method of mining coal by deep 

 shafts to beds of inferior quality, of only one to two feet in thickness, 

 and of attempting to recover at great expense the many millions of tons 

 of good fuel already left in the pillars, roofs, and bottoms of long aban- 

 doned mines. This is no fairy story. It is as sure to come to pass at 

 approximately 50 years in the future, if present wasteful methods con- 

 tinue, as that the sun will rise tomorrow. 



Present Waste of Fuel 



It can do no harm to recall some of the sins of waste committed in the 

 past, since many of these still persist. The citizens of Pennsylvania, and 

 especially of the Pittsburg district, have already wasted more of their 

 precious fuel supplies, both solid and gaseous, than they have ever used. 

 More than thirty thousand beehive ovens continue to consume, almost 

 within sight of their great factories, one-third of the power and all of the 

 precious by-products locked up in the finest bed of coal the world has erer 

 known, and of which, as we have seen, they have such a limited supply. 

 The quantity of natural gas, that best of all the fuels, which western 

 Pennsylvania has wasted from the many thousands of wells drilled within 

 her borders, vastly exceeds in value all the petroleum she has ever pro- 

 duced. Xot satisfied with thus despoiling their own fair commonwealth 

 of its most precious fuel possession, some of the most powerful corpora- 

 tions, with headquarters in Pittsburg, have been the principal agents in 

 wasting unnumbered billions of cubic feet of this precious fuel in the 

 sister states of Ohio and Vest Virginia. The general superintendent of 

 one of the great gas companies told me only a few days ago that he had 



