Worldwide steel production got schmeissed and utilities lived off their inventories of steam coal when generating capacity turned into a surplus.
Commodities like oil, copper and iron ore just relapsed and both metallurgical and steam coal spot prices stick in the dumps despite serious cutbacks in production, worldwide.
This is where it should sell if the cycle timely turns, but there are no indicators as yet that better steam coal pricing or a recovery in metallurgical coal is in the cards.
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In 2009, the company generated 29% of its revenue from selling steam coal to power plants, and 10% from sales of coking and pulverized coal that feeds the blast furnaces at steel mills and other metallurgical operations.
On the other hand, if the industry scraps all of its smaller and older plants, Credit Suisse estimates, steam coal demand would drop by 15% to 30%, or as much as 324 million tons a year, while gas demand would increase 8% to 16%, or as much as 3 trillion cubic feet a year.
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We created a print literate workforce with the communication skills to organize a First Industrial Revolution driven by coal and steam power.
There's nothing new about turning coal into gas--19th-century street lamps burned "town gas, " a dangerous mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, produced by blasting coal with steam.
It's trying to sell its solar product to industrial customers, including coal-fired plants, which would use both the sun and coal to make steam.
The former uses coal, oxygen and steam to produce burnable hydrogen.
Al Gore's campaign is gaining steam but not the dirty, coal-fired kind.
In the railroad industry, it took decades to get rid of coal-shovelers, holdover from steam locomotives, from the cabs of diesel engines.
While the big deepwater ships that carry huge quantities of the nation's iron ore, coal and other goods are able to steam the deep waters of the Great Lakes as they always have, they must carry ever lighter loads to avoid grounding on the increasingly shallow harbors where they unload.
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The wheezing, steam-powered devices that we used to have to load with coal before starting up would soon be the preserve of historians and cranks.
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Located just south of Capitol Hill, the plant burns 47% coal, 43% natural gas and 10% fuel oil to provide steam power and chilled water to the Capitol and 23 surrounding buildings.
It must either be mined from the surface like coal (to which it is just as similar as it is to oil) or through expensive steam injection with or without the injection of petroleum distillates.
These could be among the first full-scale power plants in the nation to turn powdered coal into a synthetic natural gas that is burned in a gas turbine whose exhaust gas powers a steam turbine.
Inside the reactor, pulverized coal (consisting of 80% to 96% carbon) is heated to 1, 200 degrees with steam at 500 pounds per square inch of pressure.
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