Waterjetting 2d - Adding cracks to Nature

In the last few weeks I have focused on demonstrating, with examples, that water effectively removes material by penetrating into natural cr...

A New Series - Waterjetting 1a

In October of 1965 I started work on a doctoral dissertation that would look at whether streams of high-pressure water could be used to mine...

Coal - the TV series

Well, thanks to the Engineer, I watched my first episode of “Coal” this afternoon. The show is on the Spike network with a significant pa...

Highwall Mining of coal

There is an aspect of coal mining that gets relatively little attention, even though it is growing in popularity, It is with this method tha...

Does the fossil fuel industry need innovation?

Most of the posts that I write tend to deal with the technical side of energy production, rather than more philosophical discussions. Howev...

Working thin coal - the coal plow and Hydrominer

In the last couple of years there has been a growing concern about the amount of coal that remains in the productive reserve for the world....

Longwall mining with shearers

The development of longwall coal mining took a significant step forward with the development of the armored face conveyor (AFC) and the self...

Longwall Mining - using hydraulics to modernize mines

In writing about longwall mining , I have gone into some detail as to how the technology initially developed, in part because of my own inte...

Controlling the roof - more on longwall technology

In describing the earliest types of longwall I mentioned that the evolution came from initially putting different mining sections into a li...

Pre-mechanized longwall mining

In the last post on this subject, I wrote about how miners were able to remove almost all the coal from a section, either by leaving small ...