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