Coalpail.com Forum

You might be surprised what was once mined and quarried in Maine, we often think of the great granite quarries or the iron deposits in the Katadin Iron Works area, but there are other minerals mined for as well. For instance we own land in Jackson which once had a copper mine, and Thorndike once had an operating slate quarry. Just for the fun of it I did a search for coal and I'll be darned if Anthracite Coal did not jump out on the page at me.

It seems in 1921, determined to find oil, an 80 foot high derrick was erected in Dover-Foxcroft Maine on the Norton Hill Road and at a depth of 2800 feet anthracite coal was discovered. They were only able to drill another 200 feet before problems with their bill forced the drill bit to seize up, and the project was abandoned. Notes from that bore indicated that "Very high quality anthracite" was discovered.

Here are the coordinates in case anyone wants to look it up on Goggle Earth.

I just thought this was interesting and wanted to share.

45.12369938 -69.15197252

There is probably some in most of the N.E. states, the deposits have to start & end somewhere, I can remember reading about a prison that used inmates to mine copper in Mass. (I believe) from what I recall most died in that prison.

I think MA had a little anthracite production, but more came from Rhode Island - http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res ... 5B898CF1D3 .

Mike

It does make sense that Maine would have some. I know New Brunswick Canada has a HUGE deposit but much of it stretches out into the Atlantic Ocean. It had a few mines on land that actively mined the coal. I cannot remember if it was bituminous coal or anthracite, which is what surprised me about the coal find in Maine...it was anthracite and of "very high quality". But boy, 2800 feet is a long ways down.

BTW: They say a huge reserve of oil lies off the Maine coast but no one is allowed to drill for it. I can see where drilling past 3000 feet would have been difficult in 1921 technology when the coal was discovered, not to mention the VERY abrasive nature of coal taking its toll on the drill bit. But I bet if they could have drilled deeper, they would have struck some. If I remember right, the gas and oil wells of Wyoming are down 6000 feet. As with most things, its not that it is not there, but rather how worthwhile it is to obtain. The tar sands of Alberta have been known for a long time and is twice as big as the middle east reservoir, but the cost of converting it to usable oil required the price of crude to be high. As prices go up, more oil could be obtained from formerly non-worthwhile resources.

This only anecdotal evidence, but I was talking to a buddy of mine in the gas industry. He said that when drilling exploratory wells for fracking, they encountered more veins of anthracite, much deeper than anything previously mined. I would imagine that coal will probably remain in the ground forever, since getting to it would be prohibitively expensive.

On that note, it really makes one wonder just how much energy there is in fossil resources that we don't even know anout yet!

Freddy,start digging !

When I had a tour of the Black Thunder Mine, which at the time...in 2000...was the largest coal mine in North America, I asked the Supervisor giving the tour how much longer they could get coal from out of the ground at the rate they were going. He said the Powder River Seam extended into Canada and we were standing in Wyoming as he said this, and figured "at the rate we are mining the seam, another 300-400 years".

It was that statement that got me thinking about what a true resource coal was. I say this because I worked for the Railroad at the time and we were moving 120 trains every 12 hours on 4 mainlines at 15,000 tons per train. Even if we assume half of them were empty returning to the coal mines for a fill up, it is still a lot of coal PER DAY! If that much coal per day could be moved...then imagine the tonnage of that single seam of coal which could get us by for another 300-400 years.

Coal is the answer...even if it is Powder River Coal that must be soaked in diesel fuel to get to burn.