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[bobf <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

Last week someone on the list said they had coal on their land -- maybe Drew? 
 This article is in today's NYT about people starting to burn coal again to 
heat their personal homes...................

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Burning Coal at Home Is Making a Comeback 
 
Laura Pedrick for The New York Times

Problematic in some ways and difficult to handle, coal is nonetheless a 
cheap, plentiful, mined-in-America source of heat. More Photos > 

   

 
By TOM ZELLER JR. and STEFAN MILKOWSKI

Published: December 26, 2008 

SUGARLOAF, Pa. — Kyle Buck heaved open the door of a makeshift bin abutting 
his suburban ranch house. Staring at a two-ton pile of coal that was 
delivered by truck a few weeks ago, Mr. Buck worried aloud that it would not 
be enough to last the winter.

“I think I’m going through it faster than I thought I would,” he said. 

Aptly, perhaps, for an era of hard times, coal is making a comeback as a home 
heating fuel.

Problematic in some ways and difficult to handle, coal is nonetheless a 
cheap, plentiful, mined-in-America source of heat. And with the cost of 
heating oil and natural gas increasingly prone to spikes, some homeowners in 
the Northeast, pockets of the Midwest and even Alaska are deciding coal is 
worth the trouble.

Burning coal at home was once commonplace, of course, but the practice had 
been declining for decades. Coal consumption for residential use hit a low of 
258,000 tons in 2006 — then started to rise. It jumped 9 percent in 2007, 
according to the Energy Information Administration, and 10 percent more in 
the first eight months of 2008. 

Online coal forums are buzzing with activity, as residential coal enthusiasts 
trade tips and advice for buying and tending to coal heaters. And 
manufacturers and dealers of coal-burning stoves say they have been deluged 
with orders — many placed when the price of heating oil jumped last summer — 
that they are struggling to fill. 

“Back in the 1980s, we sold hundreds a year,” said Rich Kauffman, the sales 
manager at E.F.M. Automatic Heat in Emmaus, Pa., one of the oldest makers of 
coal-fired furnaces and boilers in the United States, in a nod to the uptick 
in coal sales that followed the oil crises of the 1970s.

“But that dwindled to nothing in the early 1990s — down to as many as 10 a 
year,” he said. “It picked up about a year ago, when we moved about 60 units, 
and then this year we’ve already sold 200.” 

Dean Lehman, the plant manager for Hitzer Inc., a family-owned business in 
Berne, Ind., that makes smaller, indoor coal stoves, said his stoves were on 
back order until March. And Jeffery Gliem, the director of operations at the 
Reading Stove Company and its parent, Reading Anthracite, in Pottsville, Pa., 
which supplies coal and stoves to 15 states in the Northeast and Midwest, 
said the uptick in interest was the largest he had seen in 30 years. 

“In your typical year you might have five, six, seven thousand stoves being 
sold,” Mr. Gliem said. “This year it was probably double that.” 

The coal trend is consistent with steep increases in other forms of 
supplementary heating that people can use to save money — most of them less 
messy than coal. Home Depot, for example, reports that it has sold over 
80,000 tons of pellet fuel, a sort of compressed sawdust, for the season to 
date. That is an increase of 137 percent compared with the same period last 
year, said Jean Niemi, a company spokeswoman. 

Coal may never make economic sense in areas far from where it is mined. But 
in places within reasonable delivery range, the price tends to be stable, 
compared with heating oil or natural gas. Prices for natural gas more than 
tripled in recent years before plunging in the last few months amid the 
downturn.

Coals vary in quality, but on average, a ton of coal contains about as much 
potential heat as 146 gallons of heating oil or 20,000 cubic feet of natural 
gas, according to the Energy Information Administration. A ton of anthracite, 
a particularly high grade of coal, can cost as little as $120 near mines in 
Pennsylvania. The equivalent amount of heating oil would cost roughly $380, 
based on the most recent prices in the state — and over $470 using prices 
from December 2007. An equivalent amount of natural gas would cost about $480 
at current prices. 

Mr. Buck said he could buy coal for $165 a ton. On a blustery afternoon 
recently, he was still studying the manual for his $2,300 Alaska Channing 
stoker, which gave off an intense heat in the den where he had installed the 
unit. An automated hopper in the back slowly dispensed fine anthracite coal 
chips into the stove’s belly, and every couple of days, Mr. Buck emptied the 
ash. He said he hoped the coal stove would cut his oil consumption in half.

“Now, somewhere, you’ve got to take into account the convenience of turning 
up your thermostat, versus having two tons of coal to shovel and the hopper 
and ashes to deal with,” Mr. Buck said. But if the $330 worth of coal in his 
makeshift bin “heats the house for the winter,” he added, “you can’t beat it.”

Wesley Ridlington, a homeowner in Fairbanks, Alaska, bought an outdoor coal 
furnace for $13,000 in March and uses it as his main source for heat and hot 
water. 



On a recent evening, as the temperature hovered around 23 below zero, Mr. 
Ridlington worked to free up the rotating burning plate inside the furnace, 
which he figured was jammed by a pebble. He did not seem to mind the glitch, 
or, for that matter, loading the furnace twice a week and emptying the ash 
pan every night. “It takes a little bit of time,” he said, “but for the 
savings, it’s worth it.”

 Mr. Ridlington said he was typically burning 1,500 gallons of oil each 
winter to heat his 3,300-square-foot home. At last year’s prices, that would 
have cost about $7,000, he said. This winter, he expects to burn nine tons of 
coal at a cost of about $1,400.

“The initial cost was expensive,” he said. “But in three to five years, it’ll 
be paid for, even with prices going down. And if fuel goes back up again, 
it’ll be even more savings.”

Rob Richards, who owns a business in Fairbanks that sells spas, pool tables, 
and now outdoor coal furnaces, said that when oil prices were higher, he 
could promise fuel cost savings of more than 75 percent and a payback of 18 
months for an outdoor coal furnace. With oil prices down again, orders for 
furnaces have dropped off, and the savings are closer to 50 percent with a 
few years’ time to recoup the cost, he said. 

“Still, you’re looking at a quick payback,” Mr. Richards added. 

Coal was a dominant source of heat for American homes for much of the late 
19th and early 20th centuries. Americans were still burning more than 50 
million tons of coal for heating in 1950, according to the federal statistics.

But coal, primarily used today in power plants and steelmaking, has not been 
used for heating on a large scale for decades. Cleaner and more easily 
distributed forms of heating fuel — including natural gas, electricity and 
oil — displaced coal, and residential use dropped precipitously, to 2.8 
million tons by 1975, and then to less than 500,000 tons by 2000. 

Even with the recovery of the last couple of years, residential use of coal 
in the United States, at less than 300,000 tons today and representing a 
fraction of 1 percent of all coal use, is “not even a blip on the screen,” 
said Carol Raulston, a spokeswoman for the National Mining Association. 

Still, even amid the steep decline, small upticks similar to the current one 
have appeared from time to time, and residential use of coal never entirely 
went away — particularly among people who lived near mines and had access to 
cheap coal.

In Homer, Alaska, fall storms wash crude coal onto the beach from underwater 
deposits. In the mountains of eastern Kentucky or the hills of central 
Pennsylvania, residents can simply dig it out of the ground. 

“As long as people have been mining coal up there,” said John Hiett of 
Kentucky’s Office of Mine Safety and Licensing, “people have burned coal in 
their houses.”

Government data suggest that about 131,000 households use coal as their 
primary source of heat, with perhaps 80,000 more using it as a secondary 
source. Those numbers are small enough that issues relating to pollution and 
greenhouse gas emissions have remained largely off the radar. 

Burning coal does throw fine particles into the air that can pose problems 
for some people, similar to the problems involved in burning wood — though 
wood stoves and fireplace inserts are increasingly subject to regulation to 
cut down on pollutants.

“Coal stoves don’t have that,” said James E. Houck, the president of Omni 
Environmental Services, a firm in Portland, Ore., that tests air quality. 
“And there’s no regulatory pressure for them to have it.”

In some localities where residential coal burning is becoming a factor, that 
might be changing. In Fairbanks, air quality experts suspect the increase in 
coal burning — along with increased wood burning, including green wood — is 
contributing to concentrations of fine particles well above federal limits. 

“We see it as a real health hazard to Fairbanks,” said Jim Conner, the 
Fairbanks North Star Borough’s air quality specialist. 

Concerns like these have not deterred companies marketing coal. Back East, 
the Blaschak Coal Company, a midsize supplier of anthracite in Mahanoy City, 
Pa., still emblazons company trucks and baseball caps with images of Santa 
Claus lugging a sack of coal.

“Everybody’s looking at wherever they can to save money,” said Daniel 
Blaschak, a co-owner of the company. “Cause guess what? We no longer have 
disposable income. We are up to our necks in debt. And there’s very few 
things we can’t live without, but heat is one of them.”