Coal Fields and Rural National Historic Sites

This map displays coal fields, coal regions, and rural National Historic Sites in the conterminous United States. The boundaries of the United States were taken from U.S. Geological Survey 1:2 million digital line graphs. The data on coal basins were obtained from three sources. An ARC/INFO coverage of coal basins in the United States (Tewalt and Oman, 1993) was the major data source, and was originally digitized from the Coal Fields of the United States maps by Trumbull (1960) and Barnes (1961). The Gulf region of this coverage was modified by Peter Warwick (U.S. Geological Survey, Branch of Coal Geology) to consist of the outcrop of lignite-bearing strata and potential near-surface deposits of Texas (St. Clair, et al., 1976) and the Jackson, Claiborne,, and Wilcox Groups from the King and Beikman geologic map of the Untied States (Schruben, et al., 1993). National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places, provided the locations and acreage of the National Historic Sites.

The accompanying table contains acreage and coal-tonnage estimates for coal-bearing rural National Historic Sites. The tonnage estimates were obtained by applying ratios based upon acreage to county-level estimates of minable coal as developed in Watson et al. (1991). The total area of National Historic Sites in the conterminous United States is about 3,700,000 acres. About 20% of this acreage contains coal. It is unlikely that federally-owned, coal-bearing portions in these areas will be leased for coal mining. Thus, the privately-owned, coal-bearing portions are a more reliable estimate of acreage which could potentially be disturbed by future coal mining. The Summary Statistics which accompany this map indicate that (1) private, coal-bearing acreage is small compared to total acreage at National Historic Sites and (2) the tons of privately-owned minable coal at National Historic Sites are a very small portion of total remaining coal reserves in the U.S. Remaining coal reserves (Demonstrated Reserve Base or DRB) for the U.S. are estimated by Energy Information Administration (EIA) (1993) to be about 474 billion tons.

References

Barnes, F.F., 1961, Coal fields of the United States: Reston, VA, U.S. Geological Survey, scale 1:5,000,000, sheet 2, (map).

EIA (Energy Information Administration), 1993, Coal production 1992: Washington, D.C., U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, DOE/EIA-0118(92) October 1993, table A-2, p. 73.

Schruben, P.G., Arndt, R.E., and Bawiec, W.J., 1993, Geology of the conterminous United States at 1:2,500,000 scale--a digital representation of the 1974 P.B. King and H.M. Beikman map: Reston, VA, U.S. Geological Survey, Digital Data Series DDS-11.

St. Clair, A.E., Evans, T.J., Garner, L.E., Nemeth, K.E., and Bartow, W.P., 1976,) Energy resources of Texas: Austin, Texas, The University of Texas at Austin and Bureau of Economic Geology, scale 1:1,000,000 (map).

Tewalt, S.J. and Oman, C.L., 1993, Coal regions and fields of the United States in digital form: Reston VA, U.S. Geological Survey, Open-file Report 93-396.

Trumbull, J. ,1960, Coal fields of the United States: Reston, VA, U.S. Geological Survey, scale 1:5,000,000, sheet 1, (map).

Watson, W.D., Medlin, A.L., Krohn, K.K., Brookshire, D.S., and Bernknopf, R.L., 1991, Economic effects of western federal land-use restrictions on U.S. coal markets: Reston, VA, U.S. Geological Survey, Circular 1042, 197 p.