Calculating the Enormous Environmental Costs of Mountaintop Removal

Over the last half dozen years or so research has been revealing what the folks of Appalachia have known for decades, that mountaintop removal is a bad thing. While previous scientific studies of MTR have concentrated on specific environmental impairments to streams or nearby ecosystems, a group of scientists have now calculated the total environmental costs of mountaintop removal, and it’s as ugly as any valley fill.

            Using satellite images and county-by-county records of coal production, the scientists examined mountaintop mining from 1985 to 2005. Appalachian coal produced during that 20-year period totaled 1.93 billion tons. That equals about two years’ worth of current domestic coal demand. To mine that coal about 770 square miles were converted from mountains and forest to mountaintop mine sites like the one pictured below.

 

Just one of the more than 500 mountaintop removal mines in Appalachia

770 square miles is the about the same area as the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. From the paper’s abstract:

To meet current US coal demands, an area the size of Washington DC would need to be mined every 81 days. A one-year supply of coal would result in ~2,300 km of stream impairment and a loss of ecosystem carbon sequestration capacity comparable to the global warming potential of >33,000 US homes. For the first time, the environmental impacts of surface coal mining can be directly scaled with coal production rates.

OK, if the enormity of that doesn’t’ knock you out of your boots, the scientists have some other numbers. One of the scientists who worked on this study, Emily S. Bernhardt, says the carbon sequestration lost when forests are wiped out to make way for mountaintop mines is extremely long-term. The associate professor of biogeochemistry at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment said:

“Based on the average carbon sequestration potential of formerly forested mine sites that have been reclaimed into predominantly grassland ecosystems, we calculate it would take around 5,000 years for any given hectare of reclaimed mine land to capture the same amount of carbon that is released when the coal extracted from it is burned for energy.”

Brian D. Lutz, who is an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Kent State University and who began the analysis for this study while he was a postdoctoral research associate at Duke last year, adds that “Even on those rare former surface mines where forest regrowth is achieved, it would still take about 2,150 years for the carbon sequestration deficit to be erased.”

            The scientists found that great areas of the Appalachians were destroyed for sometimes paltry amounts of coal. Their data suggests that some mines were instigated to dig up coal seams that were only about one meter in thickness. Including the valley fills and other adjacent disturbance to the land, they calculated that the area disturbed by a mountaintop removal mine exceeds by 50 percent the spatial extent of the underlying coal.

            Working with Lutz and Bernhardt was William H. Schlesinger. He is a biochemist and President of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies an independent not-for-profit environmental research organization in Millbrook, New York. The study was published today in the online peer reviewed journal PLOS ONE.  No external funding financed the study.