Coal

Open-cut brown coal mine at Yallourn, Victoria

Coal is a combustible material which was formed by decomposing plant and animal material placed under intense pressure.

The mining of coal as a fuel sparked the Industrial Revolution, as coal was used to power factories and railways, first through the generation of steam, and later when coal became one of several methods of generating electricity.

Laboratory experiments show that coal can be formed in a matter of months, and with temperatures in the range of 100 to 150 degrees Celsius for brown coal and 400 degrees Celsius for black coal.

Types of coal

Four types of coal are:

• Anthracite - the cleanest burning coal, found in such regions as south Wales and northeast Pennsylvania.

• Bituminous coal - widely found in Appalachia and widely used, and does not burn as cleanly as anthracite.

• Sub-bituminous coal - of a lower grade than bituminous and a higher grade than lignite, and is widely mined in the Powder River Basin region of Wyoming.

• Lignite - also known as "brown coal", is the dirtiest burning, and is mainly used in power generation. The top two locations for lignite mining are Germany and Russia.

Graphite, used in pencils and as an electrical conductor, is technically a type of coal of an even higher grade than anthracite, but is not used as a fuel as it is hard to ignite.

Origins

coal sitting on clay, with no evidence of soil

Young earth creationists believe that most coal was formed during the Great Flood . They make a number of arguments in support of this theory:

• The time required to turn plant material into coal is small enough that the biblical timescale is quite sufficient. The vast amounts of time suggested by uniformitarian geologists is not actually required.
• Polystrate fossils indicate that successive layers have formed quickly.
• There is often no evidence of the soil that the plant material grew in, suggesting that the plant material was washed into place.
• Trees found in coal beds often turn out to be types that do not grow in swamps, as proposed by uniformitarian explanations.

Secular scientists propose that coal formation took long periods of time, with the most recently-formed coal being formed a million years ago. They generally propose that the plant material accumulated in swamps

Bibliography

• Jackson, Wayne, The Record Buried in Coal, Christian Courier, December 12, 2006.
• Walker, Tas, Coal: memorial to the Flood Creation 23(2):22–27, March 2001.