Source: Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy
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The coal in western Virginia was created about 300 million years ago, when swamps in the Central Appalachian Basin created organic material faster than it could decay. Most of that coal is located in modern-day Buchanan, Wise, and Dickenson counties, on the Appalachian Plateau.
The carbon was captured in plants during the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian ("Carboniferous") periods, prior to the mountain-building "orogenies" that created the Appalachian Mountains over 200 million years ago. In some places, the bedrock of the Appalachians and the coal beds were pushed miles to the west, as Africa-North America collided and the Appalachian Mountains were formed. The Pine Mountain thrust sheet near Kentucky was uplifted and moved perhaps 5-13 miles as pressure from the southeast squeezed the surface.1 The crust folded and often broke in the Valley and Ridge province, and some chunks of "thrust sheets" were shoved westward without significant folding. In the uplift of the Appalachians, the coal was squeezed - but not enough in the Appalachian Plateau of southwestern Virginia to fold the sedimentary beds as tightly as in the Valley and Ridge province, and not enough to create even the semi-anthracite at Merrimac Mine in Montgomery County. After the uplift, the coal beds were compressed by overlying sediments that washed off the new Appalachian Mountains. In Montgomery County, the Merrimac Mine on Price Mountain (between Christiansburg and Blacksburg) shipped coal to Norfolk via the Virginia and Tennessee railroad east to Lynchburg in the 1850's. Tradition holds that, from there, the coal from the Merrimac Mine travelled all the way to Portsmouth and fueled the Confederate ironclad Merrimac (also spelled Merrimack) that dueled with the Union ironclad, the Monitor. The first battle between ironclads was also the first battle between ships fueled exclusively by coal. The "coal counties" in southwestern Virginia were unable to ship their product to market by rail before the Civil War. After 1865, Northern financiers supported the extension of Virginia railroads into the timber-rich and coal-rich mountains. The Pocahontas Mine in Tazewell County has a seam of high-quality coal 13 feet thick, making it unusually easy to mine. By World War I, after the Norfolk and Western railroad built a rail line down the New River from Radford, then through West Virginia to the coal fields, the Pocahontas Mine became a major supplier of coal for the Navy. In eastern Virginia, coal was mined in the 1700's from the Triassic Basin west of Richmond/Petersburg, near Midlothian in Chesterfield County. That Richmond basin was formed as the Atlantic Ocean opened up AFTER the Appalachian Mountains were uplifted, so the coal near Richmond is younger geologically that the coal near the West Virginia/Kentucky border. From Chesterfield County south of Richmond, coal was carried on rails in mule-pulled carts to Manchester and Richmond. Later, mules were replaced by locomotives fueled by wood. The small size of that Midlothian coal field limited its importance to the local market. Richmond and Petersburg grew economically because of manufacturing supported by James River and Appomattox River waterpower, more than from coal brought out of Midlothian. |
The coal fields of the Valley and Ridge physiographic province had value, but were too small to support large-scale industrialization. Managers of iron furnaces in the Valley and Ridge province relied upon locally-produced charcoal, created from partially-burned wood, until after the Civil War. Theoretically the iron producers could have imported coal from Eastern Virginia, but it would have been too expensive to purchase coal from the Richmond-area mines, ship the coal up the James River on the canal boats, and finally haul the coal by wagon to furnaces in the Shenandoah Valley.
The Appalachian coal fields had national and international significance, once they were developed in the 1880's. The role of coal has been critical in shaping the growth of Southwest Virginia for over a century. The region has alternated between boom and bust economic cycles. The demand for coal surged in the 1880's, when the railroads made it possible to ship the bulky product to the commercial marketplaces. In the 1980's, the demand dropped due to Clean Air Act requirements for low-sulfur coal, and the supply of low-cost coal from Virginia has dropped with the exhaustion of the easy-to-mine coalbeds.
Because the coal fields and the oil/gas fields in Virginia are concentrated in the southwestern part of the state, the Virginia Department of Mines, Mineral and Energy used to maintain multiple offices in the region. Offices in Keen Mountain (Buchanan County) and Abingdon (Washington County) were consolidated with the offices in Lebanon (Russell County) in 2009. Separate offices still remain at Big Stone Gap (in Wise County).
The Southwest Virginia economy is still vulnerable to "bust" as well as "boom." Some mines are still operating, however. Mine owners are concerned that there will be too few trained miners if demand increases, because the children of retired miners moved away or chose other lines of work and need formal training in coal mining.
For the long term, the Department of Energy predicts that increased demand for coal will be met by other regions. Even if a "clean coal" process could be developed for using coal to meet increased demand for electricity, Virginia's coal fields are not likely to see a major jump in production. Instead, look for increased mining in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, or in the Indiana/Illinois/Western Kentucky coal fields).2
 most coal mined commercially in Virginia comes from Buchanan, Wise, and Dickinson counties Source: Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research, Virginia Energy Patterns and Trends |
 predicted growth in coal output to year 2030, showing how production from Appalachian fields is predicted to decline Source: Department of Energy's Annual Energy Outlook 2008 with Projections to 2030 |
In the 2012 elections, the Republican Party accused the Obama Administration of conducting a War on Coal, and campaigned extensively in the southwestern part of Virginia. An October, 2012 rally in Grundy drew 5,500 people - when the total population in Buchanan County was less than 24,000.3
A major justification for that partisan claim was the decision by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and to issue other regulations that could be a "train wreck" for coal-fired power plants. However, one of the greatest long-term threats to coal was not political, but economic. As described by the Congressional Research Service, the development of natural gas combined cycle technology in the 1990's offered an alternative, cost-effective way to generate electricity at lower cost than maintaining old coal-fired power plants:4
Some Federal regulations affect the cost of mining coal, such as Mine Health Safety Administration mandates to require effective ventilation systems to minimize the potential of methane gas explosions. The EPA regulations regarding air quality and coal ash disposal have a substantial impact on the cost of burning coal to create electricity. Some "met" coal is mined for metallurgical purposes (making steel), but the US Energy Information Administration has noted that 90% of coal mined in the United States was used to generate electricity - but the competition from Natural gas was increasing:5
 coal outcrop near Mountain Lake in Giles County |
 coal still produces more electricity in the United States than any other source of energy Source: US Energy Information Administration, What is the role of coal in the United States? |
