MS Bard

MS Bard

Heck of a photo. Nice little ferry boat on a very big, very cold sea. They run excursion tours in the Arctic ocean around Svalbard, Norway.

MS Bard

This boat uses the same power transmission gear as a diesel locomotive. They have diesel engines generating electrical power that is fed to two 350 kilowatt electric motors that turn the propellers. Similar to a hybrid car, but no giant battery pack. This has a couple of advantages over a conventional drivetrain. There is no mechanical gearbox, so the engine does not need to be aligned with the propeller shaft.

Svalbard

Odd feature of Google Maps - notice the light blue circle. It is not the Arctic circle, it is very much smaller. The Arctic circle is at 66° 34' N, this circle is about 20 degrees farther north. Clear the search box and the circle disappears.

Abandoned Coal Loading Dock

The Russians have been digging for coal on Svalbard since the 1920s. I thought I put up a post about it before, but maybe not. Svalbard has appeared here before.

1919 Levant Mine Disaster

The Mine Disaster UNDER The Ocean
Scary Interesting

Most interesting for the description of the working conditions. It's just crazy. Presumably, guys were working in the mine because it was easier than farming, or was it because they didn't have any land they could farm? Pretty grim in any case. And then there's the crazy 'man engine' they used to raise men out of the mine.

Lady of the Gobi: trucking coal across the desert to China

Lady of the Gobi: trucking coal across the desert to China
The Guardian

Gives a different picture of life on this planet.

The Moat Pit - Culross Scotland

I was reading a story on Unherd about the resurrection of Culross, Scotland, an old coal mining town and it mentioned this mine. Coal must have been a valuable commodity back then, much like oil is now.

The Moat Pit

Scottish Mining Museum:

Most of Scotland's coal in the sixteenth century was mined close to the Firth of Forth and transported by sea. Shipping the coal from the Moat pit at Culross, Fife, was easy because one of its shafts emerged on an artificial island on the foreshore. Boats could come alongside to load directly from it.

This remarkable innovation was developed by Sir George Bruce of Carnock in 1590. Sea water, which leaked constantly into the pit, was drained by a horse-driven chain of buckets and emptied back into the sea. The pit was flooded in a violent storm in 1625 and abandoned.

Remains of the Moat Pit

Map showing location of Moat Pit

The pit isn't really visible on Google Maps. It looks like there are a bunch of rocks just under the water. hard to say just where it is.

Industrial Green Energy

Aerial view of Enviva Biomass facility in Northampton County [Courtesy of Dogwood Alliance]

On one hand it seems like a good idea, on the other it just seems a little shady.

People are trying to be 'green', so they are burning wood pellets instead of coal, the idea being that growing trees suck as much CO2 out of the air as is produced when they are burned, so burning wood is considered carbon neutral. If you are one of Greta's acolytes, you might think that's a good thing.

Problem is the world burns about 8 billion tons of coal a year. I don't know if there are enough forests on the planet to compete with those kind of numbers. Whatever, demand has been growing and now there are a bunch of wood pellet factories operating in the southeast United States, cutting down forests, grinding the logs into wood pellets, and shipping them all over, including Europe.

Here's the shady part:

Biomass is contentious not just locally for the adverse impacts on those who live near wood pellet plants, but also globally for the unusual way its carbon emissions are tallied.

Under global accounting rules, emissions from burning wood are calculated where the trees are harvested, not where the material is burned.

That means countries can avoid counting emissions from their wood-fired plants while reporting the coal displaced as a greenhouse gas reduction. - Aljazerra

Wood pellets also cost more than coal:

Anthracite coal costs a lot less than wood pellets per unit of heat (BTU). A pound of Anthracite coal has almost twice the heat as a pound of wood pellets, therefore pellets have to be almost 1/2 the cost of Anthracite coal to be at the same cost per unit of heat. The cost of pellets would have to drop to $140/ton to be equal to the cost per unit of heat (BTU) of Anthracite coal that cost $250/ton. - Heet

Coal, if you buy it by the trainload, is much cheaper, like $40 per ton.

Coal

2024 Forecast Coal Production

Some people make a lot of noise about much CO2 you get from burning coal. Some parts of the world, like India and China, could benefit from just cleaning up the smoke.

Sample Layout of Emissions Controls at a Coal Power Plant

Yes, pollution controls are expensive, but they seem to work. No, they doesn't have any impact on CO2 but since we are likely to become radioactive dust at any moment, I wouldn't worry about it.

Rail Traffic

This Association of American Railroads produced this very fancy, interactive chart of railcar traffic. If you just look at the plotted lines it looks like the volume of traffic varies wildly, swinging from a zillion to zero and back again. If you look at the scale along the left hand edge, you realize this chart is focused on the top one-third of data. The bottom two-thirds of the chart aren't shown.

In any case, it looks like half a million railcars are put in motion every week. That's like one for every 600 people in the USA. Traffic is about evenly split between containers (intermodal) and everything else (carloads).

There was a big disruption in train service when they started shipping coal from Montana and Wyoming to the power stations in the east, which was when? 20 years ago? It took several years to build all the additional hopper cars and locomotives they needed to handle this additional traffic. It wasn't that there was more coal being moved, the coal-fired power generating plants weren't burning any more coal, and they weren't building any more coal-fired plants, it's just that the transit time was longer (days versus hours), and they needed more cars and locos to make up enough trains to keep the pipeline filled. Anyway, there was a lot of grumbling about disruptions in train service when this started, but now that they have enough equipment to keep the pipeline filled, things are back to normal.

Anyway, with all my attention on coal, I would have thought it would be a bigger part of the total traffic, but it seems to be only about one-sixth of it.

Intermodal Train on the left, Lomard Street on the right, Mount Hood in the distance.
Looks like the train must be headed west, but they put locos on both ends of the train, and sometimes in the middle, to get over the mountains to the east.

I saw a big intermodal train all queued up along Northeast Lombard in Northeast Portland last week (like the one in the picture above). A mile long train is an impressive piece of equipment.

Via Bayou Renaissance Man

Coaling

Coaling the Pacific Mail S.S. "Siberia" at the fortified naval station of Nagasaki, Japan, 1904

The Atlantic Transport Line has the interesting history of this ship. This photo is from a stereograph. The "fortified naval station" is likely Sasebo Naval District:

Sasebo was a small fishing village until shortly after the start of the Meiji period. The Imperial Japanese Navy chose to build a naval base here based on its protected, deep-water harbor, geographic proximity to China and Korea, and the presence of nearby coal fields. The base, founded in 1886, became the major port for the Japanese navy in its operations in the First Sino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War, and remained a major naval base to the end of World War II. Along with the base facilities, the navy also constructed the Sasebo Naval Arsenal, which included major shipyards and repair facilities.

Via Posthip Scott.

Skyfall

One of things I like best about spy movies is the way they take you on a virtual tour of the world. This time one of the highlights was Shanghai. This picture gives you some idea of what it's like, but it doesn't hold a candle to the scenes from the movie.

We also paid a visit to Hashima Island. I knew I had seen this place somewhere before, and I was right. I found some old, tiny photos of it. Suprised that I kept them, they were so little. The villain claims he started a rumor that caused the place to be abandoned within a matter of days. It's true that it was abandoned quickly, but that is because Mitsubishi decided to shut down the coal mine there, which was the only reason for anyone being there.

Update: This place was a coal mine for years, which means they were digging tunnels underground, which means, given the location, they were digging tunnels below sea level. God forbid you ever sprang a leak.

Bucket Wheel Excavators

I was cleaning out my email today and I came across a draft that had map coordinates to a couple of bucket wheel excavators in Germany, so I marked them on a Google map. Normally this works pretty well, but this time we got a glitch: the satellite images don't line up. I sent Google a note, we'll see how long it takes them to fix it.

Bucket wheel excavators are large machines used for strip mining coal. I think they use them in Germany because they have soft coal there, and these machines work well. I don't think we use them much in the U.S.

Interesting thing is that if you go to the map view, all these machines are located in one area with no roads. Hmmph. Imagine that. No roads to the excavators. But you can see them from a satellite. They look like little marks at the default zoom setting. The more you zoom in the more you realize how big they are. There are excavators at all of the blue markers on the current version of the satellite map. The red one has very precise coordinates, but there is no excavator there. Maybe there will be if and when the map gets fixed.


View Larger Map

The Lettuce Train

Sometime in the last couple of years I saw a show on PBS about a train that carries produce from California to New York non-stop everyday. Okay, they stop to change crews and maybe they only run it once a week, not every day. Something got me started on this topic this afternoon (I don't even remember what it was now), and I could not find anything I was all done with my first draft and went back looking for links and pictures. Then I found something. But before that, all I found was all kinds of related stuff, like how they used to do it, and how some railroad is going to start service from Walla Walla Washington to Rotterdam (a suburb of Schenectady) New York. But I could not find any reference to such a train being run now. I did find one reference that mentioned it was laughable for the railroads to try and compete with trucks in shipping produce:

"Shippers and motor carriers may be excused for laughing when they hear railroaders talk about reefer traffic as a growth opportunity. Reefer traffic--freight moving in mechanical refrigerated boxcars or intermodal trailers and containers--is a business from which U.S. railroads have virtually been expelled over the last two decades."

I think what happened was the Clean Air Act. All of a sudden anthracite coal from Appalachia becomes carbona-non-grata and the coal companies start digging up low sulfur coal in the Powder River basin in Wyoming and shipping it to the East Coast at the rate of 300 million tons a year. That basically consumes all of the railroads resources and they can no longer be bothered with a single express train full of perishable vegetables, they have real work to do. So the lettuce train fell into disuse and the trucking industry took over. The railroads have had a couple of decades or so to adjust their business to this new long distance coal transportation model. They have automated their systems and now they are ready to start competing with trucks for the less than "100 fully loaded trains a month" deals. 

Coal Trains at North Platte, Nebraska

Update April 2021 replaced missing view of coal trains.