Coal Industry Funds Hands-off Surface Mining Research at WVU
The State Journal
21 November 2011
By Pam Kasey
MORGANTOWN - A $500,000 grant to a team of West Virginia
University researchers represents a new coal-industry approach to
understanding the effects of surface coal mining.
"This is an entirely different strategy on the part of the
industry," said Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the West Virginia
Water Research Institute at the National Research Center for
Coal and Energy.
The WVU team of researchers is part of the seven-university
Appalachian Research Initiative for Environmental Sciences, or
ARIES, administered the Virginia Center for Coal and Energy
Research at Virginia Tech. The team includes, in addition to
Ziemkiewicz, Todd Petty, Mike Strager, Jeff Skousen and Louis
McDonald, all from the Davis College of Agriculture, Natural
Resources and Design, and Vlad Kecojevic from the College of
Engineering and Mineral Resources.
ARIES is funded by numerous industrial affiliate members,
including, in the coal industry, major producers Arch Coal and
Alpha Natural Resources as well local coal producer MEPCO and
railroads CSX and Norfolk Southern.
New Approach
The shift ARIES represents in the coal industry is from an
approach of secrecy to one of transparency.
"The industry has been on the defensive," Ziemkiewicz said.
"They've been relatively reticent about results. They've done a
lot of work and have a lot of internal reports, but they … never
rise to the level of peer-reviewed, documented research. In the
meantime, they see the research agenda being dominated by studies
done half a world away that are used to make their lives more
difficult."
With ARIES, he said, the funders laid out a set of broad
priorities and left it to the consortium to assemble teams,
conduct research and get published.
"The industry has absolutely no preconception as to whether the
results will be beneficial or make their lives more difficult. But
they still think it's better to get good information out that's
relevant to their sites than to be subject to hearsay,"
Ziemkiewicz said. "That is a different approach to life than I've
seen in my career here. It's some advanced thinking on the part of
industry."
Projects
At the outset, the WVU team has a range of projects.
Skousen and McDonald will look at the weathering of mined rock to
predict water quality impacts.
"As we learn more about the chemical properties of mined rock, we
will better understand the duration and chemistry of discharges
and help operators develop mine plans that minimize pollutant
release to the environment," Skousen said. "Our research team has
been developing technologies for managing mining impacts to
aquatic resources for decades.
ARIES will help to carry technologies developed by his research
team over decades to the entire Appalachian region, increasing the
likelihood that progressive mining practices will be implemented
by the industry and regulatory agencies, he said.
Also on the team, Kecojevic will study surface mining methods with
a goal of developing an information system to help improve
practices and coal recovery while minimizing environmental
disturbances. Petty and Strager will evaluate watershed-scale
effects of water quality changes.
Ziemkiewicz, who leads the team, already has submitted a paper on
the controversial issue of selenium, research he conducted before
the ARIES funding but wants to have considered as part of the
ARIES database.
"What we're looking at is how fast selenium weathers from rocks,
how high the concentration gets and how long it lasts before it's
gone," he said.
"We're seeing the ‘cookout,' or attenuation, rate getting below
the regulatory limit of 5 micrograms per liter within 20 to 25
years," he said — a period he considered short compared with that
of some pollutants, such as sulfur, which last "forever."
Monitoring of the Mud River, a tributary to the Guyandotte River
in southern West Virginia, has shown no adverse effect of selenium
on the fishery, he said — a finding that conflicts with past
research in the same waterway.
"We're finding that the mutation rates are well below 10 percent,
which is normally considered to be the background mutation rate
for fish," Ziemkiewicz said.
Freedom
ARIES offers an unaccustomed and welcome freedom and focus to
researchers, he said.
"Everyone who does research has this whole backlog of things they
would really like to study if someone just gave them money, what I
would almost call curiosity-oriented research," Ziemkiewicz said.
"What happens in reality is, we have to wait for a Request for
Proposals to come popping out of some government agency — and it
may not really quite fit what we want to do."
The ARIES funding allows the researchers to pursue the questions
they've been most curious about, within a broadly defined program.
Further, because the funding is made available to a small
consortium of universities, researchers aren't competing with "the
entire world" for a relatively limited pool of monies, Ziemkiewicz
said. Researchers studying surface mining near Appalachian streams
don't have to somehow make a better case for their work than those
studying nutrients related to soybean farming in a river in Iowa.
Given that freedom, Ziemkiewicz wants to advance his research on
selenium by gathering data related to other mines and other coal
seams. He wants to study more closely the effects of selenium on
fish. And he wants to broaden the same type of work to other water
quality parameters, including sulfate, dissolved solids and
electrical conductivity.
Research he hopes to see from other WVU ARIES studies includes
refining the ability to model individual watersheds so that system
stressors can be manipulated to figure out what truly needs to be
done to maintain fishery health.
"That's what the Clean Water Act really wants you to do," he said.
Such targeted research goes directly to the questions policymakers
need answers to, giving them a better dataset to work with,
Ziemkiewicz said of the program.
He expects to see five years of funding from ARIES.
The ARIES initiative is composed of, in addition to WVU and
Virginia Tech, the University of Kentucky, Ohio State University,
the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania State University, and
the University of Pennsylvania.