Positive and Negative Effects of Coal

The natural resource that I am writing this paper on is coal. Coal is a cheap, dirty fossil fuel which we burn to create power. Coal is the most abundant in North America and in Russia, including the area around it. China also has a fairly good amount of coal in it too. Coal, like all of the other fossil fuels is nonrenewable and will eventually run out, in the not so near future. Coal is very important to many of the countries of the world. The countries that use the most coal are China, the United States, India, Russia, and Japan. These five countries “account for 76% of total global coal use.” (World Coal Association, 2014).

Lower quality coal is used for generating electricity. To generate electricity they burn the coal in a power plant to produce steam. The steam then travels through a turbine and generates power. The higher quality coal is used for making iron and steel. Coal is retrieved from nature by mining, either from an underground mine or from an aboveground mine. Due to the difficulty of underground mining coal from underground mines sells for more money. After the coal is mined it is processed to remove impurities from it. Lastly it is transported, “The cost of shipping coal can be more than the cost of mining it.” (US Energy Information Administration, 2013). Transportation methods include, truck, barge, train, and pipeline.

Coal has a very negative impact on the environment, one of the main impacts on the environment is the actual process of extracting the coal from the ground. The two ways that coal is mined, underground and surface, both have different effects on the environment. The first way that coal is mined is by digging tunnels and creating mineshafts underground and then removing the coal from th...

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...ummer are all more expensive than the other cars and coal.

4. The reason we don’t replace coal energy is because it produces a profitable amount of energy, just like most cars get fairly good mpg. While solar and wind energy are not efficient and take a ton of sun and wind as well as entire farms of panels or mills to produce the same amount of energy, which goes back to solar and wind being more expensive.

5. Solar and wind energy are not consistent with producing energy if there is no sun or wind just like finding fuel is not consistent with electric vehicles because so little places have electric pumps.

Note that nuclear energy is another alternate fuel source, which would be like a really expensive Prius that sometimes leaks radiation when it suffers a major breakdown. Which is a scary thought because many Prius owners don’t even know how to change a flat tire.