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 ...

The Earliest Longwall - coal mining before the 1830's

Earlier I have written about the large amount of coal that was often left to hold the roof up while miners excavated the coal from rooms off...

The Mining Disaster in West Virginia

The news of the death of at least 25 coal miners at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia is a reminder of the human costs that are...

P32 Pick Points

Half-a-dozen or so stories of interest: In what appears to be a win-win situation New York is learning what those of us who live in more rur...