Learn about diverse and integrated markets for primary energy, and the essential considerations driving business leaders and policy makers in development of global energy resources.
Coal Value Chain
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来自 University of Colorado System 的课程
全球能源业务基础
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从本节课中
Key Capabilities for Energy Business - Fossil Fuels
A range of technological and commercial factors determine accessibility and utilization of conventional energy resources. These lectures review considerations essential to the development of various fossil fuel sources of energy, including coal, oil, gas, and shale gas.
与讲师见面
Michael J. OrlandoLecturer
Global Energy Management, Business School
Let's begin by considering the coal business.
There are three basic stages in the
value chain between coal producers and coal consumers.
There's mining Transportation and then either the coal goes directly to end use
or it's converted to some other form of consumable energy.
Mining refers to the activities conducted either the surface
or underground in the location of the coal deposits.
Surface mining is can be either open pit
methods strip mining methods or mountain top removal.
So open pit is pretty self explanatory it just refers to you know, you kind of
pull out all of the aggregate material that
contains the coal and you leave a pit behind.
And by the way I would encourage you to Maybe, as
much as taking away whatever I am able to present in the four corners
of these videos, utilize some of this discussion to
identify key phrases, key words to search on.
You can find great videos and Illustrations about these mining methods.
So hopefully you will, will do some searching pause
the video and do some searching outside to supplement.
What I'm going to trying to tell you here in a some what expeditious manner, so
that's open pit methods strip mining can be
either, you know, basic strip mining or area stripping, or contour stripping.
It basically refers to an open surface method whereby you would
excavate a, a strip of over burden material over
top of a Of a coal deposit that you want to develop.
And then you would remove and then you
would excavate the overburdened material in a strip next
to that initial strip and place the overburdened
material from the second strip into the first strip.
This is where it gets its name, stripping doesn't refer to the to the verb
to strip away something it's referring to kind of the the geometry of the technique.
So the second, the overburden material from the second strip will be taken
out inside of void space created by the first strip in the first [UNKNOWN].
Now you've exposed the The coal underneath the second
strip and it kind of continues successively like that.
Then mountain top removal is another surface method
but it doesn't necessarily leave behind a hole.
Because you're basically going to take the, in
this case the overburdened material is the
portion of the mountain that sits above the coal seam that you are interested in.
So you would take.
Away that over burden which is, is the top of the mountain and put it in an adjacent
an adjacent valley or, or gulley or something like that.
And then in addition to service
mining methods, there are underground mining methods.
Long wall mining refers to a technique where you go into the Earth.
And you, you identify a strip or a I
shouldn't use that term, identify a seam that you're interested in and you
basically go back and take a piece of that out,
supporting the ceiling as you're going deep into the ground taking out.
That portion of, of the coal and then what you do is you move
into the scene and basically grind away more of the
coal and follow the seam and you kind of take the coal
out typically on a conveyor belt supporting the roof as you move.
Into the seam so you just kind of continuously scraping away
or grinding away that coal face and you are supporting the roof that you
are now creating by grind away that coal face that's called long wall mining
and then maybe older methods of room and pillar and retreat.
Which is just a phase of essentially funicular mining.
But in room and pillar mining you would go into the
ground where you find a coal seam and you would basically excavate.
Lots of different rooms, leaving behind some, the walls
of the rooms, essentially, to support the overburdened material.
The roof of the mine.
The earth that's above you.
And so that you can imagine you wind up leaving a lot of material behind.
A lot of potentially mineable material behind because The walls of the rooms
are essentially the same thing as the void space was, of the room.
You're just leaving it behind to hold up the roof.
So typically a final phase of that method might be retreat mining, where you go to
the furthest portions of the mined area and
you start taking away those walls or those pillars.
And so potentially then The roof is going to cave
in as you retreat you know towards the mine mouth.
In the transportation phase in some very limited case find that coal mining doesn't
require much transportation at all, if there
is some use immediately proximate to the mine.
Like if there is a power generation facility
or a, a steel manufacturing facility built right there.
You might actually have just either cart it to the,
to the Util- to the coal using facility or maybe
set up a conveyor belt and have continues feeding of
the goal out of the mine directly in the facility.
But whats much more common is that your going to move the, the coal by rail.
And, so vast majority is going to moved by rail.
In some cases if the mine is approximate to a water way you might move it by barge.
What's more likely if it ever winds up on a
barge is it's going to move by rail to a barge because
the barge is going to be used maybe to move it to
some end use facility which happens to be on a waterway.
Maybe it's a, a factory that's on a waterway to
be able to cost-effectively move its final goods or maybe it's
an electric power Generation plant that's on a waterway to,
be able to take advantage of relatively low cost, barge transportation.
And then, the end of the value chain is, either, one, one
possibility And the easy one to conceptualize is sort of an
immediate end to use by say, a home owner for heating or
cooking or you know, whatever household might make use of it for.
The other type of end use that's pretty common
and certainly much more common here in the US.
It would be steel manufacture using coal for coking, for
the thermal work that it can do to help create steel.
But the vast majority of the coal here in the U.S. we'll see is actually used
for electricity production, which means that This energy source, coal, is actually
going to be converted through, through process
of electrical generation to create a different
kind of energy, which is actually the form of energy that's put to end use.
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