Texas relies heavily on other states’ coal, and keeps all its own

[thackney]

Texas relies heavily on other states’ coal, and keeps all its own
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2016/11/15/texas-relies-heavily-on-other-states-coal-and-keeps-all-its-own/

Texas received the most coal of any state in the country in 2015, while none of the 36 million short tons of coal produced in Texas leave the state, according to the latest coal distribution report released by the U.S. Department of Energy this week.

The majority of Texas’ coal, or 55.2 million short tons, came from Wyoming. Coal mines in Colorado, Virginia and Oklahoma gave Texas a combined nearly 800,000 short tons of coal in 2015.

As with other  states, Texas uses nearly all of its coal for electricity generation, and the remainder goes to industrial plants. Nearly 70 percent of the nation’s coal is transported by railroad, and nearly 93 percent of it is used for electricity.

Much of Texas-produced coal is known as brown, or dirty, coal, and comes from lignite, considered a low-quality coal due to its low heat content and high carbon content.

The low quality of Texas coal has played a role in the shut down of one of the state’s largest coal mines, the Jewett Mine, between Houston and Dallas. In August, NRG Energy pulled a contract with the mine to switch to cleaner-burning coal from the Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, the nation’s biggest source of coal. As a result, the Jewett mine owner, Colorado-based Westmoreland Coal, said  cut the mine’s roughly 250 jobs in December and January.

[Joe Wooten]

The reason Texas does not export the lignite is that it has an alarming tendency to catch on fire just from the heat of evaporation of the water contained in it. Texas Utilities (now Luminant) leased up all the good lignite areas back in the 1940's and 1950's, and actually built a large lignite powered plant at Sandow to power the Alcoa aluminum plant nearby. All the gas fired generation they built in the 1950's and early 1960's had the boilers designed to be able to be converted to fire lignite when natural gas got too expensive. As a test, they took several rail cars of lignite mined at Sandow and took them north towards Dallas during a hot summer day. The train had gone less than a hundred miles when the coal cars became a flaming mess. That ended all talk about shipping lignite more than a few miles to a mine-mouth plant. Biggest job at the four lignite fired plants they have is watering down the coal piles, and they are still smoldering.

[Joe Wooten]

HOWEVER, there are several old deep shaft bituminous coal mines in the strip of Texas running from the Thurber area (right off I20 near Ranger) running up to a small town west of Ft. Worth called Newcastle. The Thurber/Newcastle mines used to supply most of the coal in Texas before the advent of oil, and most were closed in the 1920's. According to surveys, there is still a lot of coal in those veins. but the mines are now full of water.