Page 328 - Advances In Productive, Safe, and Responsible Coal Mining

304 Advances in Productive, Safe, and Responsible Coal Mining

highly unionized labor force lost their foothold, largely due to sizable nonunion mines
opening in the Powder River Basin with repercussions that spread throughout the larg-
est coal companies. Longwall mining methods also became more widely employed.
Globally, Europe was eclipsed by Asia as the leading coal producer, and Australia
surpassed the United States as the leading coal exporter. The robust economy of
the 1990s led to tremendous expansion in the coal industry with annual coal produc-
tion reaching and exceeding 1 billion tons in the United States and Asia. In the United
States, production from surface mines surged past production from underground
mines as economies of scale were realized in the Powder River Basin. In the first
decade of the 21st century, the talk of global warming throttled the previous decade’s
expansion in the United States leading to a wave of mergers and acquisitions. Glob-
ally, however, economic growth in China led to a surge in Chinese coal production and
imports with much of the latter coming from Indonesia. This decade ended with a
global recession sparked by the US financial crisis that spilled into the next decade.
In the current decade, coal markets have been significantly impacted by the availabil-
ity of cheap natural gas and tremendous growth in renewable energy sources. What the
future holds remains to be seen, but it is clear that the industrialized world requires
energy and coal is still one of the most efficient and economical energy sources.
During the last 50years, one can see in the brief summary just provided that at
times, local trends ran counter to national or global trends. For example, while US
coal production grew to surpass the billion-ton threshold in the 1990s, in the author’s
home state of Illinois, coal production fell by one-half due to clean air legislation.
Twenty years later, while US coal production was declining significantly, Illinois
Basin coal producers were experiencing robust growth including a surge in coal
exports.
Coal industry employment has experienced similar booms and busts although
employment trends do not always track with production trends due to increased mech-
anization and automation. For more than a decade, there have been ongoing discus-
sions regarding an impending skilled labor shortage in the coal-mining industry. This
shortage will affect all sectors of the industry including production workers and man-
agers, engineers and geologists, mine inspectors and regulators, and even professors
and researchers.

15.2 Why research is important

Lifestyle or standard of living is based on wealth creation. In the book Unlimited
Wealth [1], one economist defines wealth as.

W ¼ P T n

where W is wealth, P is physical resources, and T is technology. Technology has an
exponential multiplier effect denoted by n. Assuming that more wealth is better than
less, improved lifestyle is a function of acquiring more physical resources or devel-
oping newer, better technology.