Coal mining is a large part of Pennsylvania history. But it still exists in the present.
Justin Emershaw is a mining engineer at Atlantic Carbon Group, based in Hazleton. He grew up in Dallas, Pa. and studied mining engineering at Penn State University.
As part of a series of events in celebration of Anthracite Mining Heritage Month, Emershaw immersed a crowd in his day-to-day life as a modern-day miner. The talk was hosted at Eckley Miners Village in partnership with the Luzerne County Historical Society.
Emershaw’s job is to look for properties to mine and design and oversee operations throughout the mining process.
Mining doesn’t look like the pictures in the history books anymore. The days of breaker boys covered in ash ended in the 1920s.
First, a blast hits an anthracite field to break the surface. Excavators pull the coal out and transfer it for processing.
“Coal is processed through what’s called a heavy media process," Emershaw said. "What it does is we take the coal, it goes in, once it gets cracked and broken inside the preparation plant, it is then floated with heavy media.”
The coal is put into a liquid solution infused with magnetite, which is iron ore. The chemicals cause the coal to float and the rock to sink.
“In the 1800s, the only way to separate the slate from the coal was to manually pick it out. They didn't have the chemistry figure to actually, you know, put the coal and rock in an aqueous solution and separate the rock from the cold just by adjusting the magnetite level which affects your gravity. So it's night and day different from the way it was 100 years ago.”
To identify mineable land, Emershaw uses maps drawn about a century ago. Some of them were drawn on linen, and can be 30 feet long. If not already in their database, he has to scan them himself and put them into their system.
“Some of the thicker ones, I mean, they actually weigh quite a bit," he said. "They're very difficult to feed through a scanner, because they're just so dense and heavy."
Emershaw says computer-aided design programs like AutoCAD allow him to see the old drawings in 3-D.
“When you have a map that's drawn on linen, over time, it tends to stretch. So you get distortion," he said. "AutoCAD allows you to stretch the map in certain areas to either distort or restore it to its correct scale in size. So that's extremely key when you're, when you're trying to be accurate in locating coal pillars or tunnels or workings.”
He says a lot of the coal that remains in Pennsylvania’s anthracite fields is underwater and cannot be mined.
“Nobody today in the industry really wants to deal with pumping and treating water," he said. "Because the minute you get into trying to pump and treat mine pool water, it really opens up a huge can of worms with risk, environmental restrictions, and cost.”
Emershaw says a lot of mine land was left abandoned when the anthracite market tanked in the 1950s. Atlantic Carbon Group re-mines the sites and restores them.
“There were no reclamation laws back then, which we have today. So operators could just close up and just leave, you know, the site a complete mess,” he said. “We're actually going back into the sites that are all ripped and torn up, very hazardous, lots of open mine shafts, maybe acid mine drainage, culm banks, and we're taking all that, we're excavating everything out, we're taking the coal out as our profit, and then restoring that land back to its original shape.”
Emershaw says their reclamation efforts help to alleviate an expense for tax payers in the coal region.
“If you don't have a mining operation that is willing to go in there, lease the property and mine it and restore it, the properties are often spun off to industrial development," he said. "Any of those big industrial development complexes that go in, you know, to abandoned mine lands, the amount of excavation and work they need to do to fill holes and everything. I mean, that's all taxpayer liability.”
