I heat with wood (if you have questions or criticisms about that, see the end of this diary).
Every once in a while a fire brick in my wood stove crumbles to pieces, usually the ones in the back, from years of being hammered with logs throughout the winter months. So I make a stop at my local fire stove dealership/masonry service place and pick up a new fire brick. The routine goes like this: I bring in my old crumbled brick, The Guy matches my brick with a new one, I slap a dollar on the counter, and The Guy says "bah, just take it."
The last time I went in, there was something new. Or, I guess, something old. But new to the store. Where the fire bricks had been kept sat four large jars of coal. Each one with a small sample pile of coal in front of it and a label: lignite, subbituminous, bituminous, anthracite. The four types of fuel coal.
When The Guy finished showing stoves to a woman, he came to me. "Hey, new brick?"
"Yeah. Hey, are you selling coal furnaces, now?"
"Oh yeah! That's something kinda new. Coal is crazy cheap and it's a nice even heat. We've been seeing more demand for 'em."
Coal heating is making a comeback. Coal, blasted from mountaintops, extracted from the ground, and burned, releasing long buried carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid.
Obviously, as incomes drop, demand for cheaper heat rises.
Aptly, perhaps, for an era of hard times, coal is making a comeback as a home heating fuel.
[snip]
Online coal forums are buzzing with activity, as residential coal enthusiasts trade tips and advice for buying and tending to coal heaters. And manufacturers and dealers of coal-burning stoves say they have been deluged with orders — many placed when the price of heating oil jumped last summer — that they are struggling to fill.
--Article
And there are few things cheaper than coal.
Now...as a primer for all y'all accustomed to warmer climes (y'all...that's how folks in warmer climes talk, eh? (Eh, that's how folks in colder climes talk, no?)) keep in mind that the further you go down the income spectrum, the older, less insulated and less heat-efficient the homes are.
So as a general rule, the lower in income the higher your heating costs per square foot of house. You can be looking at upwards of $300 to $400 a month in heating costs during in the coldest times of the year. This can even rival some house payments.
It's no wonder that those who can, those who aren't quite eligible for heating assistance, will start to seek out alternative forms of heat. Like wood, or in this case, coal.
On the plus side, coal is cheap heat. Crazy cheap heat. Cheaper the closer you get to the source. As little as $100 a ton, which apparently is about as much as it takes to heat a normal home for a month. Compared to $150 for a cord of processed and delivered wood, it's cheaper than wood. It's also a nice even heat by all accounts.
On the minus side, coal is environmentally nasty stuff. It's damaging to extract with adverse consequences from mountaintop removal, loss of habitat, methane gas release, and acid runoff. And burning the stuff re-introduces carbon dioxide that has been trapped under the ground for millions of years, as well as sulphuric acid.
Now...to keep things in perspective, at this point the folks heating their homes with coal are likely so few as to have a negligible impact on the amount of extra coal mined or burned in the United States. It's probably less than a rounding error. We're using a lot less coal than we used to on the home heating front...
Coal was a dominant source of heat for American homes for much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Americans were still burning more than 50 million tons for heating in 1950, according to the federal statistics.
[snip]
Even with the recovery [in coal stove use] of the last couple of years, residential use of coal in the United States, at less than 300,000 tons today and representing a fraction of 1 percent of all coal use, is "not even a blip on the screen," said Carol Raulston, a spokeswoman for the National Mining Association.
But its growing popularity is a phenomenon that indicates a reverse of what we want. That we're seeing movement back to that direction At All is disturbing. And in most cases it can be attributed to lower incomes, and several consecutive years of rising fuel costs.
There is a very real potential for negative environmental impact from unemployment and declining or flatlined income rates.
Now...a little bit about wood.
I don't want to be too sanctimonious about wood. I heat with wood. Wood heat is linked to increasing particulates in the air, and exacerbating asthma and lung ailments. Though most of that is from open fireplaces and older wood stoves. These days you can get high efficiency, EPA approved fireplace inserts and stoves that dramatically reduce particulate. It has a secondary burn that vaporizes most of the particulate. Throughout the year, you can barely even tell that I'm running my fireplace from the outside as there's no smoke coming out of the top of the chimney.
--> Wood is a local source of fuel in most places that burn it.
--> And most of the wood comes from dead-fall, storm toppled trees, and pruning the power company does to keep tree limbs from the power lines.
--> You're rarely cutting whole living trees to use as fuel wood (it's not desirable burning wood anyway).
--> Well managed woods or even neighborhoods with trees can produce a cord of usable fuel per 1 to 5 acres, indefinitely. Year after year. Decade after decade.
--> About a cord of wood per month can heat an average home.
--> At 640 ares per square mile, if 1/3 the woods in Muskegon County were well managed by the owners and the wood sold for fuel, it could produce enough wood to heat almost every household in the county at 61,000 households. Year after year. Wood is plentiful in most northern climates.
--> Carbon dioxide produced from burned trees is from an above ground source of CO2, currently "in-play". By contrast it's not re-introducing CO2 that has been buried underground for millions of years.