THE FACTS ABOUT SOME OF OUR MOST VALUABLE RESOURCES.

                                              email me    macgeo1234@hotmail.com

    The first of our natural resources I would like to talk about is coal. There are so many misconceptions concerning the use of coal in the environmental communities and so much ignorance as to the uses of this valuable maceral that I feel it should be explained to those who would be willing to read and understand. I don't expect environmentalists to comprehend it because it matters not what the explanation is, they will shake their heads in "no" anyway. However, I feel the surest way to get the message across is to give the message anyway,regardless of their powerful, minority status. Which it is, because of many reasons whether they be puritanical due to ignorance or because of money in one way or the other.
   First off, coal is not a mineral as most people would refer to it as. It is a gathering of volatile materials referred to as macerals with the most valuable being carbon.
   There are 4 classes of coal depending on their types of maceral contents.
   The most common are the following:
   Anthracite being the purest of macerals and therefore the hottest burning and most desired for heating and the smelting of iron ore.
                 Bituminous being the most desirable for the making of carbide steel to different levels of strength due to it's content of the grade of bitumen called Coke. Coke is one of the closest relatives of pure carbon. Diamonds being the purest, to my knowledge.
                 Lignite is a lower grade of bitumen mixtures and is used principally for the purpose of burning and heating. It contains more contaminants undesirable for the making of materials requiring strength. However, coal in general has many byproducts used in many different domestic products  in the manufacturing countries of the world today.
   Graphite is lower in bitumens and used in the production of pencils and printing.
   Peat is the precursor to coal befor it comes under pressure from the weight of the earth.
   Peat was very commonly used for burning and heating purposes in past centuries.
   The purpose of my explaining this as simply as I can is to show you how important coal is to the modern world we are used to living in.
   The environmentalists, in their quest for a "clean" or "green" earth would abolish the use of coal in it's entirety regardless of the consequence to them or the rest of us in  the much larger majority.
    The current Administration is agreeing with them and is in the midst of imposing stiff regulations to curtail the use of coal and all other fossil fuels without reasonable regard as to what we have readily available to replace them.
    How absurd and ridiculous can they be? This is a very important concern, because the graduation from coal to alternative means of energy needs to be done in a gradual length of time in order to accommodate the cost of doing so. Alternative energy at this point in time is far too expensive compared to the use of coal. With the economy the way it is right now, the extra money required to make the transition is horrendous and unsustainable. The present cost of producing electricity with coal is 22 cents per kilowatt hr. Right now, the cost of producing alternative power by windmill farms etc. is amounting to 22 dollars per kilowatt hour. Ridiculously unaffordable to the taxpayer, and only because the Obama Administration wants to satisfy the EPA by doing it sooner. Again their is no common sense compromise by Obama or the EPA here. I'm not saying to ignore the desire for cleaner air entirely, but with some more reasonable length of time to develop filtering costs etc. "Rome wasn't built in a day", so to speak.
   It is complete ignorance on their part and it's intentional on top of it all. They know better but don't care. How careless is that?
   There are methods of using coal in a clean, efficient manner and all we need to do is support the research of those ways and assist Industry so they can afford to develop them. Japan has achieved it and so can we.
   Education in fossil fuels needs to be a priority but our socialist educators won't allow it.
   Once again it's the tail wagging the dog even though they are a pitifully small part of the American majority.
   Stand up for fossil fuel production, folks! For now that's all we have that's affordable for the present.  Just sayin'.




















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