OPINION — Coal’s valuable export earnings

Coal is the non-glamorous chemical cousin of the diamond, and it has always had an image problem. Now, at last, the public perception seems to be catching up with reality.

Our coal industry is earning belated acclaim as a somehow typical ingredient of the “great Canadian compromise,” by which is meant the tapestry of mining, export sales, transportation and spinoff enterprises (large and small) in everything from straightforward supply to high-tech research — all of it providing that bread-and-butter requirement of communities from coast to coast: jobs.

Whenever intrinsic value counts for more than outward appearances, plain old coal is a runaway winner in terms of foreign market earnings, provision of present-day energy needs, and hope for industrial diversification here at home and overseas. Just ask the thousands of people whose livelihoods depend every year on this multi-billion-dollar segment of the Canadian economy. And in that process, the coal industry has cleaned up its once-notorious reputation. The Coal Association of Canada (CAC), the 70-member official voice of the industry, maintains that there can exist an acceptable balance between enhancement and production at every one of the country’s 28 mines. Increasingly, CAC companies discover that their greatest challenge no longer involves making the changes that society demands but, instead, explaining to the public that the work has already been done.

It’s hard to believe, for example, that the last of the smelly, dust-ridden, old pick-and-shovel coal towns vanished more than three decades ago, replaced by planner-designed modern communities and mines where automation and the latest heavy machinery boosts output to unprecedented levels. Canadian miners produce about 70 million tonnes of thermal and metallurgical coal annually. Every year, we have been selling close to half that amount to 20 or more countries overseas, for export earnings of $2 billion. Massive investments, almost entirely provided by the private sector, were required to make Canadian coal an important player on the international energy scene — $5.6 billion during the 1980s to bring six new mines into production in Alberta and British Columbia alone, $1.7 billion in the years 1982 to 1985 to improve the nation’s railway transport systems, and a further $450 million over the same time-frame to upgrade the facilities at several coal-handling ports. And the work continues.

Despite two decades of intense production, the country’s coal reserves appear to have remained almost as bountiful as ever. Canada has a supply of economically recoverable coal that will last for centuries at current mining rates. Indeed, 70% of our fossil energy potential still remains locked up in those unprepossessing leftovers of the peat bogs formed 280 million years ago. But to ensure a continuation of that super-abundance, exploration goes on. Recently, Canadians were probing beneath the sea-bed with test drilling equipment, up to 50 km beyond the Nova Scotia coastline. Typically, they found eight entire seams of coal, one of them 5 meters in thickness — a vast reserve that awaits development.

Just the thought of ever being able to uncover such a find would have seemed an impossibility to the pioneers of

mining in the Maritimes, where primitive hand-worked collieries produced Canada’s first native coal about 250 years ago.

A continent away, on the plains and mountainsides of western Canada, huge surface mining operations have entirely replaced the tunneling of a former era. It is a technological leap made possible by the size and versatility of modern earth-moving equipment and a fortunate geologic happenstance which has positioned many coal seams barely beneath the ground surface. Worked by both stripping and open-pit methods, the sites provide 94% of the country’s total coal tonnage.

— From “Canadian Coal 1994,” a publication of The Coal Association of Canada.