JeffEngel wrote:There's Glacierheart, obviously. I was wondering if anyone else recalled major coal mining locations, or had reasonable speculations about them. The steam engines are going to be mighty hungry for them.
Well - assuming they're all running on coal, anyway. Safehold's got a variety of oil fuels too, including as I recall one that's grown. Would any of them be practical alternatives anywhere?
Better question: What kind of coal? Lignite, Bituminous, Semi-Bituminous, Semi-Anthracite or Dry Anthracite? The coal from different localities and from different seams in any given locality also differs in its properties, especially in its specific gravity and in the amount of slate and bone mixed with it. Regarding Coke, mid 19th century processing (the infamous Beehive coke oven) needed to be low in sulfur to make a high-quality iron, and, to support proper combustion, it needed to have the size and strength to resist crushing under the weight of ore and limestone in the blast furnace. Heretofore, low-sulfur coals had not yielded coke with the desired structural qualities and coals yielding the desired structural qualities were high in sulfur. Only the discovery in the Connellsville region of low-sulfur coal which yielded a coke with the desired structural qualities made it possible to produce higher-quality iron at a cost still well below that of pig iron made with charcoal.
And exactly this is one of the advantages of the by-product coke oven: Perhaps the most significant factor favoring the expansion of the blast furnace industry was the fact that coals from various sources could be gathered together at a large, centrally located by-product plant and mixed together to produce better coke oven charge. The Chicago district, for instance, could import Pocahontas coal from West Virginia or Connellsville coal and mix it with inferior Illinois coal to produce excellent coke. Used separately, the Illinois coal could not produce an acceptable blast furnace fuel.
For example, in "Kingdom of Coal" the authors point out that as early as 1812-1813 Baltimore was consuming 7,000 to 10,000 tons of coal annually (in 1820 New York had about 150,000 residents, Philly about 64,000). By 1840, anthracite production had reached 864,000 tons annually.
Mid 19th century Pittsburgh was consuming 400,000 tons annually for home-heating alone