Taylor eyes coal waste's worth

Jul 2 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Joseph Kohut The Times-Tribune, Scranton, Pa.

The borough could be sitting on a potential 360,000 tons of coal fine, and plans are being discussed to turn this powdery product into profit.

Just how much profit remains to be seen, though, according to Borough Manager Dan Zeleniak.

"The value of coal changes day to day," Mr. Zeleniak said. "One thing I know, however, is there's less coal day to day. I can only assume the value keeps going up."

When Scranton seemed to be the center of the anthracite coal universe in the early part of the 20th century, Taylor was no exception.

Mounds of anthracite coal were once stored at a colliery site in the center of Taylor. The coal needed to be washed before it could be sold. The water, full of coal dust, used to run into Keyser Creek, until the federal government declared it to be a health hazard and ordered the mining companies to stop.

The mining companies responded by channeling the wash water into a man-made basin located within "a stone's throw" of today's bypass road near the closed bridge on Main Street, Mr. Zeleniak said.

There, the denser coal fine, a powdery substance made of anthracite coal, sank to the bottom of the approximately 20-30-foot-deep, 6- to 7-acre basin, Mr. Zeleniak said.

Since mining operations ceased in Taylor, the basin has sat unused for approximately half a century, allowing vegetation to reclaim the land.

In 2006, local firm Kaufman Engineering Inc. tested a sample of the coal fine and estimated the basin held anywhere between 3,000 and 7,000 BTUs per pound, mining engineer Walter Kaufman said. A BTU is the unit of measurement that describes burning potential of one pound of an energy source, Mr. Kaufman said.

Marketable anthracite coal has an estimated BTU value of 12,500, Mr. Kaufman said. But coal fine measured between 3,000 and 7,000 BTUs can be burned in cogeneration plants designed to burn waste coal, he added.

Efforts to dig up and appraise the coal fine have been stymied by a bypass road that takes Main Street traffic around a closed bridge, Mr. Zeleniak said. This bypass road cuts directly over the former basin, truncating it by approximately 40 percent, he added.

He estimated it could take another 18 months to reopen the bridge and take out the bypass road. After that, the borough intends to look at excavating and selling the coal fine to local cogeneration plants.

Gerald Price, a geologist with Kaufman, said the borough has been in contact with him, looking for contacts at cogeneration plants who could come out and give an estimate on coal fine's value.

"We want to get a fair and accurate evaluation of what the deposit is worth," Mr. Zeleniak said. "It could be worth nothing but it also could be worth a million. We just don't know yet."

Contact the writer: jkohut@timesshamrock.com, @jkohutTT on Twitter