GOTW: Coal flow chart

In this Graph of the Week, I want to take a look at another of those US Dept. of Energy flow charts that I love so much.

This time around, it’s everyone’s favorite, coal:

(Click on the image above to see the full-size version in a new window.)

You can find links to all of the flow diagrams from the Annual Energy Review on the AER’s home page [•], in HTML and PDF format.

Note that the units in the above chart are millions of short tons per year.[1]

The interesting bits about this one, in my opinion, are:

• The sheer size of the US annual coal consumption, over 1.1 billion short tons.
• The US supplies all of its own demand, with a slight export surplus. Given the US’s large reserves, and how often we’re called “the Saudi Arabia of coal”, and how the reserves of those two fuels have been questioned lately, it’s true.
• 92.9% of US coal consumption goes for electricity. Think the coal industry is worried about a push to reduce CO2 emissions from electricity generation, given the cost and difficulty of widely implementing CCS (carbon capture and sequestration)?
• The US residential sector still uses about 400,000 short tons of coal per year, presumably for heating. From the age of 13 to 21 I lived in what was once coal country (Wilkes-Barre, PA), and even I have a hard time wrapping my head around that one.

But wait, you must surely be thinking, how does all that coal get to all those power plants? Largely by rail, of course, and it’s a big chunk of the US railroad industry:

• According to the [US] Bureau of Transportation Statistics and this page [•], in 2002 coal accounted for 17% of all freight ton-miles (not just that traveling on railroads), for a total of 562 billion ton-miles.
• According to page 3 of this 2008 document [• small PDF] by the American Association of Railroads:
  

  Coal is the most important commodity carried by US railroads. In 2007, coal accounted for 44 percent of rail tonnage and 21 percent of rail revenue. …railroads handle more than two-thirds of all US coal shipments.

  A pie chart on the same page shows that the 21% of railroad revenue is the largest single source by a considerable margin.

44% of all freight ton-miles??? Does anyone else here think the railroad industry has to be almost as unhappy over coal’s dim prospects as the mining companies are?

Finally, and most obviously, there’s the environmental price we pay for burning that constant river of coal. In 2007 alone, the US emitted 2.16 billion metric tons of CO2 from just coal consumption [•].

[1] For those of you not up to speed on your tonnage, a short ton is the “small one” (2,000 pounds), and a metric ton is the “big one” (1,000kg or 2,206 pounds). The seldom-mentioned long ton is 2,240 pounds, which is apparently still alive and well in the UK and some other places, where it’s known as an imperial ton [•].