A NEW SOURCE OF POWER 



Billions of Tons of Lignite, Previously Thought Too 

 Poor Coal for Commercial Use, Are 

 Made Easily Available 



By Guy Elliott Mitchell 

 Author of Our Greatest Peant Food," " Our Coae Lands," Etc. 



LIGNITE is a low grade of coal — the 

 lowest and poorest in heat units, 

 J and only a step removed from 

 peat and wood. The government coal 

 geologists estimate that the deposits of 

 this fuel in the United States exclusive 

 of Alaska aggregate about 740 billion 

 tons (740,000,000,000), of which fully 

 one-third belongs to the public lands. 



A few years ago it was not considered 

 important whether there was much or 

 little of this coal. It was good enough, 

 perhaps, for the farmers to dig out a 

 few loads and burn in their homes 

 throughout the Great Plains region, 

 where it is found ; but it contained too 

 few heat-units and too much moisture 

 to generate steam under a boiler, so it 

 was looked upon as of no industrial im- 

 portance whatever. 



Moreover, it would not bear transpor- 

 tation well, since it air-slacked and crum- 

 bled. A large part of the waving wheat- 

 fields of North Dakota were known to 

 be underlain with lignite, but it was too 

 young geologically, too poor in fixed 

 carbon, to be of any great material use 

 to the State or the Nation. Subjected 

 to volcanic or other great earth press- 

 ures, or aged a couple of million years, 

 it might become a second Pocahontas 

 coal and attain great value commercially. 



But the value of a thing is often a 

 mere matter of knowledge concerning it. 

 The Saint Louis World's Fair came 

 along, an exposition of the products of 

 the great territory acquired from Napo- 

 leon, and it was fitting that as a result 

 the lignites of the Dakotas and Montana, 

 parts of that wise purchase, should be 



demonstrated to have an incalculable 

 potential value. 



BY WHICH lignite RIVAES OUR B^ST 

 COAES 



The present director of the new Bu- 

 reau of Mines, Dr Joseph A. Holmes, 

 suggested the establishment of a govern- 

 ment fuel-testing plant at the Saint Louis 

 Exposition, under the Geological Survey, 

 and one of the most important and far- 

 reaching discoveries of the tests was that 

 lignite, the useless, the despised, would 

 do more actual work, turn more wheels 

 of industry, ton for ton, if burned in 

 a gas producer, than the highest grade, 

 highest priced Pennsylvania or West 

 Virginia coal fed into the best steam 

 engine in existence. 



The results of these tests are among 

 the most remarkable of an age replete 

 in wonders of discovery and invention. 

 North Dakotans need not wait two mil- 

 lion years nor pray for a volcanic con- 

 vulsion to transform their lignite into 

 coal ; the lignite today has an industrial 

 value which may yet turn many billowy 

 grain fields into thriving manufacturing 

 centers. 



Plainly stated, these Geological Survey 

 fuel tests showed that when coal is made 

 into producer-gas and then used in a gas 

 engine it has from two to three times 

 the efficiency or driving power that it 

 has when burned under a steam boiler 

 in the ordinary way. The high-grade 

 coals, too, were found to possess a 

 greater efficiency when used in a gas 

 engine, but the spectacular feature of 

 the experiments was that vast stores of 



