Oral History Interview with Harry Laviers, Jr.

[Begin Interview]

Interviewer: Okay. We’re recording with Mr. Laviers. And this is June the ninth. (?) probably wouldn’t realize how one goes about discovering where coal is. So, if you could give us some sort of a brief description of how coal is found.

Laviers: Well, the exploration for coal in Eastern Kentucky started as a project for employing Civil War veterans. The Civil War, I guess, was one of the first technological wars. And there were a lot of engineering people who were building railroads and one thing and another. And at the end of the war, they started a program of mapping the coal seams of Eastern Kentucky. The transportation of that day was mostly by foot or on horseback. And mostly up the various creeks of Eastern Kentucky. And as they would come up each creek, they would encounter the coal exposed in the creek. And if you were coming up Elkhorn Creek, the first coal seam that you would encounter was called Elkhorn Number One. And the second coal seam you would encounter would be called Elkhorn Number Two, Elkhorn Number Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, however many seams there were exposed by that creek. In effect, that creek was a slice right down through the Appalachian Mountains, and it exposed these coal seams. Now at that time, there was not a lot of sophisticated mapping. And as you can well imagine, Elkhorn Number Three seam might actually be the same as, say, Millers Creek Number Four. Because if Millers Creek was cut down lower than Elkhorn Creek, it would have exposed coal seams that were lower down in the section. And therefore, they would encounter a seam, say, on Millers Creek that wasn’t exposed on Elkhorn Creek, because Elkhorn Creek was not cut down low enough. So, every coal seam was identified by the creek and the position that it occupied going up that creek. Now that was a very primitive method and has led to much confusion even today. Because those names, even though they are not very much what you would call scientific notation, have remained in use, and are very firmly entrenched in people’s minds. [phone rings] Uh oh. And easily eradicated. So that’s where the coal seams were first encountered. Now later on, as mapping was done and as elevations were available so you could know that this seam was at elevation one thousand feet, and this seam was at elevation seven hundred feet, you begin to do what was called correlate.

Laviers: I think it would be properly called cross-correlate. So that the seam that was exposed on one creek was really known to be the seam that was exposed on the other creek. And those seams, generally speaking, by the late 1800s, were pretty well defined. And the people, I know my grandfather, for example, that’s how my family came into Kentucky. He was working for exploration crew. And he was actually out of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. And he came down the Ohio River on a steamboat and came back up the Kentucky River as far as Jackson. He had the 1879 maps that had been produced. And his job was to take a core drilling machine, a device which has a hollow barrel, and which is studded with diamonds so it’s very sharp. And you rotate it and you force that barrel right down to the rock. And you bring out a section of rock called a core. And his job was to take the existing maps and the existing information and go with the core drilling machine. And he would set up a hypothesis that this seam is really the same as this other seam, and he would drill holes down in the ground, maybe at one mile or two-mile intervals, to ascertain that his supposition was correct. So, he ended up with an accurate map, a map that was confirmed by the intervening gaps being filled up by these core holes. He would see the coal as it was outcropping on the various creeks. He would correlate it. And he produced what’s known as a stratigraphic map—a map that shows the substrata of the earth, and which strata is where, and what the sequences were. Now coal is not so much like oil. You can much more carefully define what coal is, and where it is. So, the coal mapping of Eastern Kentucky was largely complete around 1895 or 1900. Now that doesn’t mean that every detail of the coal was known, because these core holes are expensive and were difficult to drill, and they were generally drilled on very wide centers. This was done to define the amount of coal that was likely to be available. Actually, he was employed by an engineering firm that was working for a railroad. And they were trying to decide, is it worthwhile to build railroads into Eastern Kentucky. And they, of course, decided that it was. And then that general information had to be more fully defined as not only is it appropriate thing to build a railroad into Eastern Kentucky, but where are the branch lines going to be off to the specific mines. So, when you come to the specific mines, you need a little more detailed information. So, the core holes they narrowed down maybe from five miles apart to maybe one mile apart, or something like that. Then you get much more detailed kind of information that yes, here is a particular piece of coal that is worthy of a mine of a certain size being located there. Then actually as the mine progresses, so that you don’t get any surprises, the mine normally will be even more closely explored, but only maybe within what you’re going to mine within the next couple of years, maybe three years. In other words, you’ll say here’s where we’re locating, and here’s where we’re going to be mining, say, between now and 1980. We maybe drill holes on thousand-foot centers in that area, because we need some very precise information. For example, if we’re going to put a continuous matter in there that’s forty-eight inches high, we don’t want to find that the coal is forty-six.

Interviewer: This is something we also want some explanation of. Because it’s–

Laviers: Back in a swamp. Back many millions of years ago, we had certain geographical conditions that prevailed. We had something that would be more equivalent to what is now known as the Everglades in Florida are known as the Okefenokee–

Interviewer: May I stop you? I missed the first two words. The coal originated; I turned it back on. Could you start again?

Laviers: The coal originated in swamps. These swamps exist in the earth today. For example, the Everglades in Florida are creating coal at this moment. The Okefenokee swamp up in Georgia is creating coal. But in order for it to work, a very special combination of circumstances had to prevail. Coal is a fossil. It is a [the] remains of a living organism. Now the vast majority of all the organisms that ever lived were eroded away and destroyed. But if a particular area was settling just at the right rate, and if there was just amount of rain needed, and just the amount of sunshine needed, and it existed for many thousands of years, as this swamp would build up with vegetation, the vegetation would be slightly slower next year. And water would come in and the vegetation would build up more. If it lowered too fast, the swamp would drown. And if it lowered too slowly, the swamp would dry up and become a desert. Now we have circumstances exactly similar to that prevailing in Florida today. I’ve been through Florida, down through the Everglades, when you could hardly see. The whole Everglades were on fire. Those fires were because the Everglades had got a little too dry, and this vegetation was burning. Now if the vegetation burns, per circumstances like that, it doesn’t remain as coal. It’s gone. On the other hand, if you come up in the Okefenokee swamp, just across the Florida border into Georgia, you’ll see an example of a swamp that is drowning. Now there’s still trees there, but they’re very specialized kinds of trees, trees that can stand being immersed in the water. They’re very peculiar looking things. The water comes up, and the trees come up out. So, the circumstances that created coal were very unique. And only a very small percentage of all the vegetation that lived in those years ever ended up as coal. But in the many millions of years that this earth has existed, those circumstances, though rare and special, are still enormous and huge compared to our human thinking. In other words, we number coals in billions and quadrillions of tons, even, which is enormous by our standards. But by the universe’s standards, or by the earth’s standards, those are pitifully small numbers.

Laviers: And they represented only a very small percentage. But these swamps were not uniform. You know, we see straight lines. That’s a human idea. Rectilinear projections, and things like that. We build our doors square. But you don’t see straight swamps. Swamps meander around. Some swamps have points in them. Some areas of a swamp may have one kind of tree, and another area may have another kind of tree. So, when those swamps become coal beds, they are by no means uniform. They have variations. And you can look at any river or any forest and see these variations still yet today. That’s the way nature is. Now if you’re just trying to define the gross amount of material that’s present, you can take a statistical, if you drill the holes, you should drill according to some sort of pattern. Because if you don’t drill according to some sort of pattern, you will skew the statistics around. But if you do drill according to a pattern, you can drill them on a quite large pattern. Just like you can go out and ask a hundred people who they think ought to be elected president, and if you have chosen the right hundred people, you can pretty well predict what the popular vote will be. But now that choosing the right hundred people is just as important in locating core holes as it is in choosing people. You must have a truly representative sample. Now that’s perfectly all right for defining large areas. But as you get more and more near to the stage where you’re going to mine that coal, you must be very specific. For example, if we’re talking about the average thickness of coal over many hundreds of acres, that’s one thing. But if you’re going to run a continuous miner through it, you don’t deal on averages. Because if it goes below the height of your machine, you don’t go. So, you can no longer do that. Now if you want to know precisely the number of people who are going to vote for a particular candidate, you have to have a much larger sample. And that’s exactly the same kind of problem we have in defining coal. But now drilling these holes is an expensive process and ties up a lot of money. So, it’s not normal that you will, today, spend money to find out what your mining conditions are going to be in the year 2000. So, on this precise kind of operation, you work just beyond the fringe of where you’re operating. So, there’s a number of different degrees of necessary knowledge. I mean, it’s not that the wide scale program is not good, for it is good, and it’s serving exactly its purpose.

Laviers: But there are other purposes that have to be served as you get nearer to the mine. So that’s the way you do it. You do it with core drills. And of course, we have quite a few pictures of them. One of the things I might want to, we have quite a collection of pictures ourselves. And some of them like fifty, sixty years old. But this very function is the function of the coal. Now not only do you have to define the thickness of the coal and its location and all that, you must define its quality. Because some qualities of coal are useful for different purposes. And this is normally done by taking the core – normally, it’s about so big around – and bringing it back in the laboratory. One is right in the next room here. And taking these samples. Again, you have to be very careful that you maintain statistical standards so that you don’t get skewed results. And analyze this coal for its coking ability and its ash and sulfur and various other contents. Sulfur, particularly, is quite important today because sulfur pollutes the atmosphere by producing sulfur dioxide when it’s burned. And that’s one of the things that the EPA controls the amount of. Now in the old days, back in the beginning, full scale tests had to be made. They actually had to build coke ovens, for example, and find out what the coking characteristics of the coal are. I have a picture of them back here. I’ll show you one. Today we have very small machines that can duplicate those results. But that’s because we have learned to statistically represent large amounts by small amounts.

Interviewer: Now coming back to the uses of coal, which you were getting into, through the, could you explain the area again when you [are] talking about taking a core sample, and explain the size of a core sample. About half a dollar, or whatever.

Laviers: A core sample is normally about the size of a silver dollar. A little bit bigger than a half a dollar. And of course, it is only a small sample of a huge amount of coal. So, you must be very careful that these samples are accurately, carefully prepared. They are sealed from the air, and they are treated as what they are, namely a representative of a much larger thing, which you’re going to treat with great respect. And there are studies that you can follow right through, and you can detect the kind of characteristics that that coal will have. For example, the most rare [rarest] specification in coal is its ability to make steel. Only a small percentage of that small percentage that was preserved has been preserved well enough to meet the standards of the steel industry. Now steel today is normally used in very thin gages. Steel, some people say their cars are made out of too thin a gage. [laughs] They can put their hand right through the fender. This is because when you’re making large quantities of things for consumers, price is the ever-important consideration, and you want to use as little of the metal as possible. But that also increases the necessity for high quality. Because you’re going to take a great big hunk of steel, and you’re going to squeeze it down until it’s hardly any thicker than a piece of paper. Now that means the steel must be very ductile. The molecules must be able to stretch and realign themselves and never tear apart. And to do that, the steel must be very pure, and it must not have any molecules in there that would tend to cause a tear to get started. That would be making the steel what we call brittle. Something that’s brittle is something that breaks real[ly] easily. And sulfur is the principal culprit for this problem. So, if you’re going to use coal to make steel, it should have a very small sulfur content, particularly if the steel is going to be used in a country like the United States, where most of the steel is used for consumer goods. Now if you’re building steel mills for India, where it’s going to be used for rail and bridges and all that sort of thing, it’s not near as important. But in a consumer society like ours or West Germany or Japan, the quality of the steel is very important.

Laviers: That’s why so much Eastern Kentucky coal goes to the domestic mills and to England and to Germany and to Japan, to consumer-oriented countries. Our company, for example, we ship about 60 percent of our coal to Japan. And that’s because they need this kind of quality, and it’s very rare. Believe me, they don’t go halfway around the world for it if it’s plentiful. So, you have to have low sulfur. Now when the steel is made, it goes into a big thing called a blast furnace, where they mix iron ore and limestone rock and coke, which is a product of coal. And that coal must have very great strength. Because in all that big furnace, the only thing that’s porous, the only thing that air can go through, is through the coke. Because the iron ore is impervious to air, and the limestone is impervious to air. So, the air that’s going to go through there to provide the heat and the reducing effect, which is actually from carbon monoxide, has got to be able to find its way through the coal. So, the coal not only must have good chemical characteristics, [but] it must have good physical characteristics where it’s very porous, where it’s very strong, where it will support this iron ore and this limestone. And those characteristics, called its coking index, are also analyzed in the laboratory in such a way that you can detect what those characteristics will be. So, when you’re exploring for coal, you not only want the quantity and the quality and location and so forth, but you must know a lot of these other characteristics, which you normally get from samples. [pause] the best coal seams, and normally the first mines went into the best seams. And as times have progressed, the best seams have been mined. One of the reasons, for example, why we ship coal to Germany is that the German coal of the quality that we have, was mined out long ago. It’s not that they didn’t have it; they did have it. But their resources now are depleted. And that, to the degree that the geology was well done, and that the exploration was well done, it is proper that each generation go into the best that’s left. Because probably the next generation will have better technological equipment to do the job with, and they can probably work in less desirable seams with the same results.

Interviewer: Could you talk for a moment about, describe a continuous miner, and go into the business of how high it can work, and whether it can work higher than, not lower, and this type of thing.

Laviers: Well, coal is really a rock. It’s a fossil rock, but it’s still a rock. And it is very, very hard. It’s much softer than many rocks, but it’s still quite hard. For example, it’s not unusual for a coal seam to be able to stand a force of ten thousand pounds per square inch. Now that means a little area maybe twice the size of your thumbnail to be able to bear the load of about three automobiles, say. It’s quite a great deal of force. So that rock is really quite hard. Now a continuous miner has to penetrate that rock, and it does it with a thing called a bit. Now a bit is a little piece of tungsten carbide, manmade material about as hard as a diamond, which is shaped very like your fingernail. And as this wheel turns, that tungsten carbide intersects the coal at an angle and chips it away. Now essentially, a continuous miner is a device to hold pieces of tungsten carbide into contact with coal with enough force to break the coal out. Now the major problem is to get a piece of material that is hard enough to do this. And to get a machine that’s got enough horsepower to turn that bit into that hard resistance. You’ve got to have a bit that will stand the resistance, then you’ve got to have enough power behind it. Now as power is transmitted, it normally goes through shafts. And these shafts are usually turned by electric motors which are connected to gears. And the forces that are necessary to cut the coal at some point reach so large a magnitude that the steel itself will bend. So, the limiting factor as to how small you can make the continuous miner is how strong is the steel and how sophisticated is your gearing so that only the very last gear turning at the very slowest speed has to stand all that force. So, the limiting factor in how high you can build a continuous miner really comes down to how strong a metal do you have, how good a gears do you have, how good a bearings do you have. Now normally, naturally, if you take a piece of steel and make it four inches in diameter, it’s going to be stronger than one that’s two inches in diameter. So normally, continuous miners are developed for thick seams where the problems are less. And then as the machine is perfected year by year, it’s a gradual, evolutionary process, they learn that they can take a little metal here away, and it won’t hurt the strength, and they can take a little here away, and it won’t hurt the strength. So gradually they start pulling the machine down until you reach the limit of the state of the art as of that day. Now the time probably will come as we get more sophisticated technology where we can mine lower and lower seams. Or we may eventually reach the stage where the bits can be made strong enough, and the miners made strong enough, that we can mine the rock that surrounds the coal and take whatever height we need. In other words, if the coal seam is only three feet and you want some more height. If you could make a continuous miner that was strong enough, with bits that were resistant enough, you could take maybe an extra foot of rock. And that would enable you to get at coal seams that we now can’t get at. The present time, most of the coal seams must be thick enough for the machine to stay within the coal, because we do not have bits and we do not have steels that are strong enough to cut the real hard rock that surrounds the coal.

Interviewer: Why don’t we get off onto the separation of coal from other matter. Originally coal was just shipped out without being cleaned or anything.

Laviers: Well, originally the coal that was shipped out without being cleaned was chosen to come from scenes where there were no impurities. Now these seams were a very small percentage of the total. But when you were working in a virgin area where no seams had been mined, your first choice was to mine coal seams that had nothing in them but coal. And as you can probably imagine, they were very rare and very few and very far between, but they did exist. So, in the beginning, the reason they were able to ship coal out like that was because they were able to selectively mine only in places where the coal was pure to start with. Those places have more or less been depleted. Not totally, but greatly depleted. So much of the coal that we have to mine today is from seams that contain impurities. These impurities are sometimes sulfur, they’re sometimes ash. They’re various materials. But they are the result of things coming into the swamp other than pure vegetation. There would be a big heavy rain and you would wash in some sand, or various other things could happen. So, the majority of coal seams are contaminated with material other than coal. Now this material differs from coal very fundamentally. Coal was once alive. In chemical terms, we refer to it as an organic material. It has a chemical structure that’s different from inorganic material. Essentially, anything that was ever alive is a hydrocarbon. That is, it is a combination of hydrogen and carbon. [phone rings] Excuse me. Anyway, coal is an organic material. And as such, it has a hydrocarbon structure. And hydrocarbon structure is chemically different from something that’s never been alive. We call things that have never been alive inorganic material. In fact, if you study chemistry, they divide chemistry into two parts: organic chemistry and inorganic chemistry. Now there are two different characteristics that you can look for. One of them, and the most simple [simplest] one, is what we call physical processes. Is the piece of coal shaped different from a piece of rock? Well, it usually it is. Rock tends to make itself into flat little skippers like dollar bills, I mean like silver dollars or something like that. Coal tends to break itself up into little chunks. Now the simplest thing to do, therefore, is to start making separations based on the physical characteristic, the difference between coal and rock. The most obvious way to do this is to have somebody stand there and look. And he can see that there’s a difference between coal and rock, and he can grab the rock with his hand, and throw it up. And that’s the way coal preparation started. People would stand over the coal, and they would manually pick the pieces of rock out from the coal. Now that’s not a very satisfactory system. It takes a lot of people, and the people are not very accurate. So, you need to try to progress to better things than that. One of the most obvious things about inorganic material is inorganic material floats. It’s lighter than water. All inorganic material is lighter than water. So, you can be sure that inorganic material will float. And there are a lot of other things that are not inorganic that will also float. But it’s a surety that the stuff that is organic will float. So, if you were to set some specific gravity ranges, you could get some high probability that above certain specific gravities you could be sure you had mostly organic material. Below certain specific gravities, you would have mostly inorganic material. Now in coal that occurs in this region, that range is about 1.50, which means 1.5 times that of water. Anything that will float that is, will come to the surface on a liquid that has a specific gravity of one and a half times that of water, you can be pretty sure it’s coal.

Interviewer: Let me stop you.

[End Side A. Begin Side B.]

Laviers: --one point five times that of water, you can be pretty sure would be inorganic. So, a very simple way, and much more effective than doing it by hand, is to create some artificial gravities by putting various chemicals together and making heavy liquids. Then you can float the coal across, and the rock will sink, and that makes a very good, reasonable separation. And that particular coal left there in that jar has been separated from its rock by that manner. And I will defy you by your eye or by your hand or any other method that you can get your hands on other than by a laboratory, to find anything in that jar except coal. Because that sort of thing works. On the other hand, there are things like sulfur and various other materials that are in the coal that we may wish to remove more completely. Then we’re going to have to go to chemical processes. We could heat the coal, for example, until it started to boil. That’s what happens to it when you stick it in that lead in there and drive off many of the gases and many of the liquids that make up the coal. And that would be one way of refining it further. Or we could dissolve it in a liquid. Like, for example, the difference between brown sugar and white sugar. Brown sugar is impure sugar. White sugar is pure sugar. And they just dissolve it in water and bring it out a couple of times. That’s called solvent extraction. Here’s a piece of coal that has been cleaned by solvent extraction. That coal was dissolved in a liquid. The temperature and pressure were changed. The coal resolidified and all the impurities are left behind. Now that piece of coal, even if you stick in the laboratory, you won’t be able to find anything but coal. That’s 100 percent coal. You can burn it, and there will be nothing at all left. There will be no sulfur in this emission or anything. That’s total pure coal.

Interviewer: Is that part of the gasification process?

Laviers: Well, no, gasification is another way of doing it. Solvent extraction is one method. Pyrolysis is another. That’s when you heat it, and it turns to liquid. Gasification is another. There are a number of different chemical processes, which get pretty involved. There are various ways to remove the foreign material from the coal, depending on how much material you want to move, and how much you want to pay for it, you can go just about any extreme you want to go. And that is, those processes are the subject of four or five hundred million dollars a year of government research. That, for example, came out of a government research project. That happens to be our coal that went through one of their projects. That was done out in Spokane, Washington, in a government plant out there. But there are all kinds of techniques. But they all came down to two general kinds: physical and chemical. And the chemical really is about three processes: solvent extraction, pyrolysis, gasification. And they each serve a different kind of future. For example, I think that that right there has a great future as a motor fuel. That, I don’t know whether most people are not aware of it, but the first diesel engines were completely fired by coal. And the engines had a short life; they wore out. The ash and the sulfur and so forth. So, they converted them to kerosene. We now call it diesel fuel, but it’s kerosene. But we’re running out of kerosene. And I think, for example, that we’ll get a lot of diesel engines fired by the very stuff you have in your hand. Maybe not too soon, but maybe like ten years down the road or something like that, as the supply of liquid fossils, which is what oil is, or gaseous fossils, which is what natural gas is, as they are depleted.

Interviewer: Well, off of our list, your notes, what were some other questions we wanted to–

Laviers: Well, what three types do you have reference to?

Interviewer: Deep, strip and–

Other interviewer: Strip and (?)

Interviewer: If you divide them that way.

Laviers: Okay. There’s also such things as conventional, continuous, and Okay. There’s also such things as conventional, continuous, and (long wall?) the three (?) [all talking]

Interviewer: That’s another subject.

Laviers: I didn’t know whether–

Interviewer: We need to get you to talk on that subject, too.

Laviers: I wasn’t sure which you wanted. The coal seams, of course, did not occur at one particular geologic age, they occurred at many geologic ages in sequence. And of course, the ones that occurred first got buried, and others occurred later. So, we have a situation where we have coal seams, one on top of the other, maybe separated by several hundred feet of dirt or rock. This is because the same type of geological conditions have occurred many times in the earth. They don’t just occur one time. They cycle, have been through many times. So, you see coal in continuous layers. So due to the time that you happen to be on there, you will see various seams exposed at various points up and down the hill and even below the hills, which is just an accident about when you happened to live. Because if you waited long enough, the rivers would erode them all back down to zero. By the way, an interesting point, about 90 percent of the coal in Appalachia is now buried in the Gulf of Mexico. Because we’re coming along quite late in the life of Appalachia. And most of the Appalachian Mountains have long been washed away into the Gulf of Mexico. And that coal is separated into many tiny little fragments. You can go right here in the Kentucky River and dredge the Kentucky River and you will find coal in it. And it’s been that way for millions of years. In fact, here’s a hill on the left, and here’s a hill on the right, and what happened to the coal in between? That’s in the Gulf of Mexico. [laughs] If you happen to come along at the right time, when the coal seams are fairly near to the surface, it may be possible to get at the coal seams by removing the surface material, moving it out of the way. That’s called surface mining, or strip mining. And it can occur depending on how hard the material is that is above the coal, how much material is above the coal, and how thick the coal is down there when you get it. In other words, if it’s ten feet, you can do a lot more work to get at it than if it’s five feet thick. And if you have to move a hundred feet of loose dirt off the top of it, that’s not near as big a job as moving fifty feet of solid rock. So, it’s really hard to say what can be done from the surface. But generally speaking, the coal must be removed, that is fairly near to the surface-by-surface mining methods. There is, again, we come down to this principle of getting very rare, something like 90 percent of the coal is too far from the surface to even be considered to be removed from the surface. In the Appalachia, in this area, I’m talking about. I’m not talking about the world was a whole. I’m talking about around here.

Laviers: So, you have to select, go to the particular seams, that are near to the surface. Then you must remove the material that’s over them by various methods. If it, depending on what the terrain is and how thick the coal is and so forth, sometimes they use bulldozers, sometimes they use big shovels, sometimes they use drag lines. All kinds of different equipment. Most of the equipment was really designed to build roads. In order to build roads, you must remove large amounts of material and move it to a different location. So, over the years, technology has developed considerable numbers of kinds of equipment to build roads. And those pieces of equipment have been adapted into the coal industry to remove the burden over the top of the coal. That’s the surface mining. Now the areas where the coal is still up in the hill but is too far under the hill to remove the whole hill, that’s called drift mining. That means that the mine goes in straight into the hill and removes the coal by underground mining methods. If the coal occurs below the hills, or below the valleys, it just means that the creek hasn’t been eroded down that far yet. And in that instance, you must drill a shaft or a slope to go down and get the coal, because it never outcrops at any location. There is no particular difference between the mining methods once you get down there. The same underground methods are used in drift mines that are used in below drainage mines. However, if the coal is below drainage, it’s more likely to have water in it, so it may be more difficult to mine. The water has to be pumped out. It’s also more likely to have gas in it. And the reason is, if it’s never been exposed to the air, there was no way for the gas to bleed off. The coal seams that occur in the side of a hill have been exposed to the air for millions of years. And even though the gas moves very, very slowly in that period of time, much of it moves out. So, the coal seams that occur above the drainage level are less likely to have gas, and of course they’re less likely to have water, because the water can run out, too. Those are the three general types of mining.

Interviewer: Now going back to the types of mining, conventional, continuous miner–

Interviewer: Would you start out by; I saw in the paper the other night that I think it’s (Crumsall?) has this system of hydraulic transportation.

Laviers: Right. Now that’s a transportation system. That’s not a mining system.

Interviewer: Right. That’s just utilizing your continuous mine–

Laviers: Yeah. Now there are three types of mining. One of them is to drill holes in the coal, insert an explosive, and blast the coal loose. Now that technique is called conventional mining. You have a drill, you drill holes in the coal, you put a powder in there, you have an explosion, it breaks the coal up into small pieces, and then you have some sort of machine to gather that coal up for you. That’s conventional mining. In continuous mining, you do not use blasting. The bits cut the coal loose from the earth without the benefit of an explosion. Now in long wall mining, you have some of the elements of continuous mining, plus one new element. If you take a very large, long area, like this, and set up a system to start removing the coal, normally there will either be a plow, something that will go across and dig it out, or there will be a disk drum, they call them shears, that will cut it, just like a continuous miner. Once you get moved back a little ways, the weight of the earth on top of you begins to exert enormous pressure on that area. For example, if the (?) is flat, and you are removing a section from it, the intervening section is unsupported, and it’s going to stress itself right on the point where you’re removing it. So, the natural weight of the earth begins to get more than that coal can stand, and that coal begins to fracture of its own accord. So, the advantage that the long wall has is that it utilizes the natural weight of the earth to fracture the coal and make it easy to remove. So as the, the thing has to get started with a continuous miner or something go in there and make the place for it to get started. But once the long wall gets going, and of course, since you got it started, get it started, the long walls can never mine more than about 60 percent of the coal that’s in that particular seam, because the other 40 percent is occupied by the various tunnels and so forth that you use to get started with. Then you can utilize the extra added weight that the earth puts onto that coal by continuously moving this line back. That’s why they call it a long wall. It is moving back away from this place, and this force is fracturing the coal. So, you’re using the weight of the mountain to expedite the removal of the coal. That’s the three general types. Now all types must have some sort of gathering and transportation system. And the gathering and transportation system can be the same. In other words, the conveyor system, which is perfectly usable in conventional, continuous, or long wall. Now you mention hydraulic transportation. A conveyor has some special problems. One of them is that when you put the coal on top of the belt and the belt carries the coal to the outside, it must turn over and come back. And as it comes back in the mine, it may tend to spill and drop material that hung onto it when it went around that curve. So that has a tendency to build up material underneath the conveyor that you must load out by vacuum cleaner or shovel or something.

Laviers: That’s not good. Also, the conveyor is moving along and is powered by some very powerful motors, and if you were to get your arm or your leg caught in it, it would jerk it off. And also, if a piece of flammable material, like a piece of wood or something, were to get against the conveyor, the friction of the conveyor moving along could cause a fire. So, there are some basic problems with conveyors. If you were to take a pipe, and put water and coal in that pipe, right, there is one, by the way. You can walk a hundred feet from here and you can see one. The pipe is totally closed. It’s intrinsically clean. The coal is immersed in water, it’s not going to catch on fire. It’s intrinsically safe. And another thing that’s extremely important is a conveyor runs in straight lines. It’s a rectilinear system. And if you’re mining along an area where the coal is difficult to mine, you must stick with your straight line, even though by just veering to the left, you could go around that hard spot. Whereas a pipe, you can easily put forty-five-degree curves in it, and you can just take it all over everywhere. Which, you know, has got a lot of advantages. So, there are some problems, however. Because in a pipeline system, you must transmit many tons of water for every ton of coal that you transmit. So, you have to have inherently large motors. Another one is that you’ll get too much material, or too large, it will cause the pipeline to stop up. And it’s very difficult to get it unstopped after it stops up. So, you have to have a very precise system to make sure that no (track?) material gets into the system. That’s been the big problem is trying to develop a system that will guarantee that the pipeline has no oversize in it. But I think that hydraulic transportation is coming. Conveyors have some basic problems. (For man?) today is much lower than it was, say, twenty years ago. The government has imposed certain standards on the production of coal that were materially different from the standards that prevailed prior to the introduction of the law in 1969. To try to put it in another way, coal mining equipment had evolved along a route of maybe laissez faire would be the description of it. It just grew, you know, up to that particular point. And it was a case of adaption. The equipment became specific to the task that it was trying to accomplish. Then in 1969, the government imposed a new set of standards on the coal industry, which were different. For example, prior to 1969, the conveyor was almost in universal use. In 1969, the federal government said, “There will be no spillage under these conveyors. We think that’s a fire hazard. We want that material removed.”

Laviers: So, the coal industry’s only choice was to put a number of people with vacuum cleaners and shovels in there to get that material up. The federal government said, “These conveyors could rub on something, and they could cause a fire. We want a monitoring system. We want fire nozzles, and we want heat sensors, and we want central boards where you monitor all these conveyors and make sure none of them are getting hot.” So, when they put all those specifications in there, the coal industry had to put in a lot of people. They didn’t say, now, you know, “Work toward this.” They said, “Do this tomorrow.” Well, a human being is a very versatile person. I mean, a human being is a very versatile machine. You can program him by just saying, “Would you go there and do this?” So, the coal industry had to suddenly put in lots of people to do jobs that they had previously not done. Now what has happened is, that has made a lot of people employed in jobs that previously didn’t exist. The jobs that existed like mining coal and so forth, they’re all going on just like they were twenty years ago. Now the equipment manufacturers are coming along and saying, “Well, we’ve got to do something about this.” Laviers: Now take the concept of hydraulic mining, or hydraulic transportation. You mentioned earlier that (Consall?) has been engaged in that. They have been. The Bureau of Mines’ first project was about fifteen years ago, where they were getting the various parameters. They pumped certain size coal through a certain pipeline, find out what the pressure drop was, and then they’d pump another size. They got the engineering parameters. Then (Consall?) started running scale models and so forth. Then they actually reached the stage now where they’re running a full pilot plant operation. Full pilot size. It’s not a whole mine, but it’s a whole section of a mine. Now when the government suddenly changed the rules in the middle of the game, the industry had to start developing equipment to meet those goals. I think you might refer to the government as something like the referee and the rule writer in a football game. They’re the ones that set the rules, and we learn to play by them. But sometimes those changes have to take some time. For example, I’m thoroughly convinced that under the present standards, the way the government wants conveyor belts done, it’s cheaper to do it with a hydraulic transportation system. Now it will take some time to develop that system, but when that system comes into effect, it will be cheaper than the cost of buying the conveyors and putting all the people in there to keep the conveyors. And in a free enterprise system, the corporations who are doing the work are supposed to minimize cost. They’re not necessarily supposed to decide what the standards are. That’s the goals of society. The government is supposed to decide that. Or Congress, really. The government, the administrative part of the government is supposed to implement the idea, but Congress is supposed to set the goals. And those changes are occurring. And I think the time will come when the coal industry produces more coal with less people. But it isn’t going to happen overnight, and it’s going to take some time to adapt to this sort of situation. For example, the government is now saying that they want the face illuminated. They want lights all over the mine. Well, the problem is how to put lights without blinding people. Now if you tried to look at me and I was sitting next to that window, you’d find it quite disconcerting.

Laviers: So, the coal industry is trying to develop lights that have a considerable illumination but a low intensity. Florescent light is a case in point, where it has the light spread out over a tube four feet long. Now we’re trying to develop things as big as this desktop which will emit light, but which will not be so bright as to blind you if you look at it. Now we’re going to eventually accomplish these things. But these tasks are not simple. A lot of people, you know, they tend to look at the coal industry and they feel that the coal industry is laggard at not accomplishing these things overnight. But they are not that easy to do. For example, you try to figure out how to make a light source that will have no bright spots, where you can look at the light source, and turn right around and look away from the light source. You see people in a television studio, they turn the lights out and they can’t see for five minutes. The light causes the eye to adapt, you know. And it’s going to take a very much more sophisticated scheme than any we’ve got, in order to light a coal mine so that the eye can look toward the light and then away from the light and not have to adapt. It’s possible. I’m convinced it’s possible. Like, for example, a firefly has a great deal of light, but it’s not very bright. It’s a chemical sort of light. There’s no question about its possibility. But to develop these things takes time.

Interviewer: How did the mines become (?)

Laviers: That’s a complicated question, and I can’t answer it in one or two words, but I will answer it for you. When the federal Coal Mine Safety Act was passed, we attempted to say that we want to improve the life expectancy of the average coalminer. And we instituted a lot of changes and a lot of things to make it safer. For example, there’s no question that conveyor belts are much safer today than they were. And I’m not opposed to this, don’t read me that way, but I want you to understand the effect of it. However, if I go in the mine to watch you and see that you don’t get hurt, which is really what the guys who are watching that conveyor belt are doing, the mine must be twice as safe as before, because not only are you in there, but now I’m in there. Or put it another way, if you have to increase the exposure of new personnel in order to protect the existing personnel, your order of increase must be considerable. Do you follow what I’m saying? And also, there’s a bulge in the curve in that when you institute, it’s like which comes first, the chicken or the egg. When you institute the standards, technology will not be available. But I must tell you that we have not yet. Because we’ve had to add so many more people to accomplish the objectives of the act. That those people who are now at risk are so much more numerous that we haven’t shown major improvements yet. But I believe it’s somewhat like what people call a learning curve or something. We’ve got to accept this bulge before we can get over on the other side of this mountain. There’s a valley over here, and I think we’ll get there.

Interviewer: What you’re saying about, say, from 1969 to 1977–

Laviers: Yes.

Interviewer: (?) I was mainly referring to previous to ’69.

Laviers: How far previous? 1800? [laughs]

Interviewer: I don’t know. We’ve had different people say that they felt that mining was safer today. And I just wondered if you– I understand your explanation from ’69 forward.

Laviers: Okay, now, from ’69 back–

Interviewer: And it is a complicated question, and you cannot lay one sentence out there and say essentially it is or it is not.

Laviers: There was a time, back, let’s drop back fifty years, for example. Technology was extremely primitive. And not only was technology primitive, knowledge of what was good and bad was pretty primitive. The effects of gas and what it could do to you, and that sort of thing, were not well known. We have progressed greatly from those days. We have made enormous strides. But on the other hand, we’re mining coal that’s harder to mine. It’s deeper underground. The natural resource is more difficult to get at. So, the strides that we have been making are not all obvious. Because we are trying to do a more difficult thing. Now I think we’ve made enormous strides. I think that we have improved ourselves by a big factor. I admit that the results do not altogether show that. But put it this way: If we were trying to mine the coal seams that those people were mining, we would have an outstanding safety record. Or on the other side of the coin, if they were trying to mine the coal seams that we’re mining, they would have an abysmal safety record. For example, we have now got roof bolts. And we now even got resin-bonded roof bolts, which spread the load even more than roof bolts do. And they are enabling us to mine safely seams that would have been slaughter had they been mined back in the 1915 era. But some of the great progress that we have made has been masked by the fact that we’re trying to mine conditions that they simply couldn’t mine.

Interviewer: Going back to your previous (comment?) about when I asked about man production, that explains why Governor Rockefeller said what he did in that editorial piece that appeared in the Courier-Journal. Because we’ve been hearing production being a great deal higher quoted. But they were not by experienced operators or executives (?) mining companies like yourself. They were looking at it from the standpoint of yes, there is more production, but they weren’t counting the number of people it took and dividing that out over the total number of people involved.

Laviers: It’s a complicated question, and no simple answers. And also, I don’t think the answers are going to be obvious for fifteen or twenty years. I think that we’re on many of the right tracks. I think we still have some major gaps in our technology. For example, we all know that we’re going to have to mine seams further under the ground, and there’s going to be more gas down there. At the present time, our techniques to keep the gas from exploding are based on confining the sources of ignition into boxes. This is called the concept of permissibility. In other words, we are taking equipment that we know is arcing, and that the arcs would be catastrophically bad. And we’re trying to confine them into boxes where they cannot get out. Now this is an enormous task, because it takes many thousands of boxes and it’s inherently an unstable situation, where you’re trying to guard against something that you know is occurring. Now we have a project down here that we’re working on, research project, where we’re trying to build an entire solid state shuttle car. Where it will be 100 percent transistorized, where there will be no arc. I don’t know how familiar you are with the technical problems, but in the past, the shuttle car must run different speeds. It must be like a car, you know. And in order to make an electric machine operate at variable speeds, you normally have to use a DC motor. And a DC motor must have brushes on it. You’ve probably got one right there in that recorder, and these little arcs are occurring in there. You also have a battery in there and a little inverter in there that’s–

[End Tape 1977OH01.12a, Side B. Begin 1977OH01.12b, Side A]

Laviers: And they would get somebody to bid on building it. We’re egotistical enough to think we know more about how to do it than some other people do. Not necessarily that we’re the only ones that can fabricate it. I mean, once we come upon what we want. But for example, we’re trying to build a solid-state shuttle car. Because I believe that it’s inherently impossible to keep the arcs from occurring. I think it’s much better. Now the state of the art is low. Solid state equipment is only maybe ten years out. And most of the solid state is lower power devices. That little motor that he’s trying to run down there is maybe a sixty-fourth of a horsepower. And we’re trying to run 200 horsepower motors. And we’ve got now (pyre?) handling transistors, commonly called three-element diodes, that can operate up in several hundred (ampule?) range, whereas that’s operating in the (milli-ampullar?) range. So, it’s coming along. It’s not here yet. But I think, for example, before we really lick the electrical problem, we’re going to have to have a failsafe system, namely where everything is solid state. And then I hope to encapsulate it. Pot it, is the term that engineers use, where it would be completely enclosed. And we’ll have it on plug boards so that if something doesn’t work, we just change that board out. And it will be potted, so if it fails, there’s not going to be any arc. In other words, if we put the actual thing in a little box so far and then fill it up with some sort of resin or something, if it fails, the failure will not come through to the outside, see? And I think all these things are coming, you know. I don’t think that there’s any question that they’re possible. But there’s a great deal of difference between science and technology. Now see, we’re not trying to discover basic new principles. We’re trying to take things that are already in existence and adapt them to our needs. That’s what you call engineering. Engineering development, really, is what we’re talking about. I think there’s an awful lot of things that can and will be done. We’ve also been working on remote control equipment. Frankly, I don’t think remote control is going to be the answer because it’s too difficult. We’re trying to come up with an adaptive system. Essentially what we’re trying to do is to form a device that we can go in there and make one cycle, and it will continue to repeat that cycle. And then when it appears that we need a different cycle, we can go in there and hands on change the cycle. That’s called an adaptive system, or adaptive control, where we can show them, it’s just like a stupid person. We’re going to take that machine in there and we’re going to go through the cycle once. We’re going to show that stupid machine what we want to do. And then we’ll get off it. Because if we have a machine that has a one-act repertoire, the coal seam changes too much. We can’t build a machine that’s going to go in there and do the same damn thing over and over again, because that’s not appropriate. We’re trying to build a machine that will go in there and we’ll learn, not by any complicated, sophisticated computer control, but by merely moving it through the cycle once with hands on control, and then let it repeat that cycle over and over again. We haven’t made any of these things work. And there are all kinds of people working on all kinds of projects, which I think will work. I think they’re technically possible. I think that one of the problems is that the timeframe of this sort of stuff is maddeningly slow. We’ve been working on the solid-state shuttle car for three years, and we haven’t been able to make it work. [laughs]

Interviewer: Well, that’s (?) situation.

Interviewer: It would be necessary to establish a metallurgical mining operation, what all would you have to have?

Laviers: Well, the first thing that you’d have to do, you want to say, how do you go together to put in a metallurgical coal mine? All right.

Interviewer: (?) the necessary (?)

Laviers: Well, the first thing that you have got to have is the land on which to mine. Now you know God created the coal; we only find it. So, the first thing you’ve got to do is find the land. And you’ve got to decide how you’re going to acquire this land. Basically, there are three or four different ways to acquire the land. One of them is to buy it, obviously. So first off, you have got to go out and find either a person or a group of persons who have the land and agree that they will sell it to you. This normally is done under some sort of an option. Because you want to go out and (?) and make sure you’re getting what you’re paying for. So, the first thing you usually will try to do is acquire an option to buy. That would be the best choice, to buy it, if you have the money. If you’re short of money, you may want to acquire an option to lease. An option to lease means that you’re going to pay for the coal as you remove it. And of course, that means that the person is going to get the income over a period of many years. People have learned about inflation, even the most ignorant of us know about inflation. And so, the people are most reluctant to deal with you on a lease because you may agree to pay them what looks like a lot of money today, and later on it won’t buy them ice cream cones. So, they’re pretty choosy about that, and you have to usually come back to some sort of a way to get around inflation, some sort of escalation formulas or something or other. But you’ve either got to buy it or you’ve got to lease it in some sort of manner and get the rights to go in and explore it. And then you have to go in and explore it. Once you explore it and decide what the quality of the coal is, you’ve got to decide to a pretty solid degree of certainty, because you’re now going to have to go sell that coal to somebody. Normally it will be a steel company. Today with government requirements, there are some utilities that are buying metallurgical quality coal. But normally it will have to be some steel company, either in the United States or some other spot in the world. And these people that you’re going to sell that coal to are going to want some sort of assurances that it’s going to be available to them, and so forth and so on. They’re also going to want some sort of assurances that they’re going to get it at some sort of a reasonable price, and it’s going to come to you over some considerable period of time.

Laviers: Now inflation, again, makes this a very complex problem. To write a contract that’s fair to the producer and fair to the consumer and takes into account that the government may impose new regulations or this or that, whatever you’ve got to do. The next step is to work out some sort of a contract. And of course, there are some people that put mines in on just pure speculation. But there are not very many of us who have got that kind of money. Most of us have to work out the economics of this thing. This is the quality of the coal, this is the customer, this is the contract with the customer, and so forth and so on. Then you’ve got to determine the quantity that you’re going to deliver, the rate at which you’re going to build up to that quantity, and so forth and so on. First, you’ve got to agree to all these things, and you normally would try to do that before you make the next step, which is normally to go to some insurance company or some bank, say, “Look, we’re able to buy these coal reserves. We’re going to sell them to this customer. It’s the best quality,” and so forth. If you have a track record of having done this sort of thing before successfully, normally, in most instances that I’ve had anything to do with, it’s been insurance companies. Because normally these kind[s] of things have to be borrowed for periods of twenty, thirty years.

Laviers: Banks normally loan money for four or five years at the maximum. And you’re not going to put it in a coal mine, get your money back in four years. It doesn’t work that way. So, it’s somebody that’s interested in some long-term money: insurance companies, pension funds, or something like that. They look over your record. They normally will hire some consultants to come in and monitor what you’ve done, to look at geological reports like the one I showed you earlier, ascertain that you really are on the right track. And then they will normally come in with some bank, and the bank will start loaning what you call construction money. This construction money will come in maybe three to four years before you sell your first coal. And that money has to continuously come in. That’s the so-called front-end money the bank may take the first three or four years. Some bank will take the first three or four years of this money as you’re coming in and building it. After you’ve got the property just about the stage to operate, usually the insurance company and take out the bank and set up the permanent financing, as they call it. Well now at this point, if you’ve had any cost overruns or anything like that, that’s when, it’s not a theory what the mine’s going to cost then. It’s known. You’ve already spent it. So, when the insurance company comes in, they come in on a fixed commitment with a known, very few insurance companies will commit themselves on cost estimates. They’ve got to have the final stuff in hand. So, if you’ve come in within reason, or if you’ve supplied the money from some other source or something and got the thing in line, then the insurance company will come in with the permanent financing and probably that year you’ll coal production will probably start.

Laviers: Now normally the first few years, the coal production is low, and the mine usually operates at a loss. If you’re a large company, and you’ve got other operations, these losses create tax advantages which can be utilized in other operations, or maybe some outside investors who have other income of some kind, or another can come in and take advantage of that during those first four or five years when it’s in the red. Then the mine will normally get up to production, and if you’re planning and everything is right, it’s profitable. You start paying the insurance company’s loans off and so forth. Then, to put it in perspective, a coal mine that mined a million tons of metallurgical coal a year may cost something like thirty-five million dollars. But on the other hand, it will have something like thirty-five million dollars of sales. Or put it another way, each dollar of investment has generated the dollar of annual sales. So, the customer’s purchasing of the coal, in effect, his contract to take the coal, really his credit, really, it comes right down to it, has been what’s been behind the whole thing from the beginning, you know. The customer wants the coal, he’s going to take it and he signed a contract that more or less means that he will take it. Now there’s always escape clauses, and there’s always, no way to get in any kind of thing without any risk. But generally speaking, that’s the sequence that it follows. Reserves, exploration, sales, construction, and production. In a mine like that, with maybe a twenty- or twenty-five-year loan, the mine still (?) possibly forty years. If you have the right reserves and so forth. Those numbers fluctuate with inflation. But the fact that about a dollar’s investment produces about a dollar’s sales is a fairly constant number. I mean, it’s not so much, I don’t know which comes first, the chicken or the egg. One causes the other. But that’s a fairly good ratio that’s stayed with it for a long period of time.

[End Interview.]