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Global use of coal has fallen significantly in recent years, declining by 2.3% to 4.6% through the first nine months of 2015 compared with the previous year, a decrease of as much as 180 million tons of standard coal, according to Bloomberg.
2016-03-06
But coal remains widely used. And as long as it is relied upon for energy, it will have to be ripped from the earth.
From China to West Virginia, here are 16 images from coal mines around the world.
China, which makes up roughly half of the global demand for coal, has decreased its coal use, and even though the country continues to open coal-fired power plants, those plants sit idle. Here a villager selects coal near a mine on the outskirts of Jixi, in Heilongjiang province, China.
Coal consumption in the European Union was flat last year, after declining in 2014. Below, miners leave after working the final shift at Kellingley Colliery in December 2015. Kellingley was the last deep coal mine to close in England, bringing to an end centuries of coal mining in Britain.
Miners working about 1,640 feet underground at the Boleslaw Smialy coal mine, a unit of the coal miner Kompania Weglowa, in Laziska Gorne, Silesia, southern Poland, on September 11.
REUTERS/Kacper Pempel
Coal miners breaking their fast during the holy month of Ramadan, 2,427 feet deep inside the Stara Jama coal mine, in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on July 15.
REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
Twelve-year-old Abdul Kayum from Assam pauses for a portrait while working at a coal depot carrying coal to be crushed on April 15, 2011, near Lad Rymbai, in the district of Jaintia Hills, India.
Getty Images
A miner waiting for a bus after leaving the Zasyadko coal mine in Donetsk, Ukraine, on March 4, 2015. Dozens of miners were trapped underground after a blast at the coal mine in the eastern Ukrainian rebel stronghold of Donetsk; 33 miners were killed.
Miners in 2014 preparing for their final working day at Hungary's last hard coal deep-cast mine at Markushegy. The underground mine, west of the capital city Budapest, stopped producing coal at the end of 2014, in line with a European Union effort to shut down uncompetitive hard coal mines.
A laborer taking a break at a coal-dump site outside Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, in 2014.
REUTERS/Anil Usyan
Miner Mohammad Ismail, 25, digging in a coal mine in Choa Saidan Shah, Punjab province, Pakistan, in 2014.
REUTERS/Sara Farid
Workers at this mine in Choa Saidan Shah in Pakistan dig coal with pick axes, break it up, and load it onto donkeys to be transported to the surface.
REUTERS/Sara Farid
All in all, global demand for coal has stalled for the first time since the 1990s, according to the International Energy Agency, which expects coal's share of global power generation to fall from 41% now to 37% by 2020, even as use rises in India and Southeast Asia. Here, a worker carries a container filled with drinking water at a railway coal yard on the outskirts of the western Indian city of Ahmedabad.
REUTERS/Amit Dave
Source: Associated Press
More than 200 coal-powered plants are slated for retirement in the US, where coal's share of energy generation was 36% in 2015, down from 50% 10 years prior. Here, coal miners enter a mine for the start of an afternoon shift near Gilbert, West Virginia.
Workers unload coal from a truck into a stock field in Cigading harbour in Cilegon, Banten province, in 2010. Domestic coal consumption has risen in Indonesia in recent years, jumping 15% to 87.43 million metric tons in 2015.
REUTERS/Dadang Tri
Steve Torgersen, a Norwegian mining expert, showing the size of a fossil footprint of a hippopotamus-like creature, a pantodont, on the roof of a coal mine on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen in 2007.
REUTERS/Francois Lenoir
A coal miner registering the quantity of coal produced by each miner on an improvised chalkboard inside an artisanal mine, or "pocito," at the town of Nueva Rosita, Mexico, in 2008. The mines, called "pocitos," or "little holes," are known for their rudimentary and often dangerous mining techniques.
REUTERS/Tomas Bravo
Rescuers carrying a miner who sustained injuries after a mine explosion to an ambulance in Soma, a district in Turkey's western province of Manisa, about 75 miles northeast of the Aegean coastal city of Izmir, in 2014. In Turkey's worst mining disaster in decades, "a fire broke out [and] one of the pits was engulfed with carbon monoxide. It was Turkey's worst ever industrial accident: 301 miners died, some burnt alive, others suffocating," according to the BBC.
Christopher Woody was an editor on the Military & Defense team, where he commissioned and edited freelance stories and reported on defense and security issues from Washington DC.Reach him on Twitter at @chrstphr_woody.
