Conservation Through Engineering / Extract from the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior

by Franklin K. Lane

And then we naturally ask, Why this long haul over mountains and through tunnels and across bridges and along streets and into houses, by railroad, truck, and on the backs of men, when at the very pit mouth, or within the mine itself, this same coal might be transformed into electricity and by wire served into factories and homes 100, 200, 300 miles from the mine? Why burden our congested railroads with this traffic? Why strew our streets with this dirt? This may be a practicable thing, a wise thing; it deserves study if coal is worth conserving.

Are there no substitutes for coal which we can use and can not export? This question immediately raises the water-power possibilities of our land, of which only the most superficial study has been made. Sell coal and use electricity would appear a thrifty policy.

As petroleum is being used as a substitute for coal—and inasmuch as the whole problem of fuel supply is one—we are ultimately compelled to an investigation of the ability of our petroleum supply to meet its present drain and to meet the expansion in its use, which is the most surprising development of our day in the study of power creation.

This spells a program of development and conservation which should challenge the ambitions of this Nation, and on a few of its features perhaps a few further words would be justified.

SAVING COAL.

The two ways by which coal in greatest volume can be saved are the discovery of the method by which more power can be taken from the ton and the discovery of what kind of coal is best fitted for any particular use.

It has been everyone's business to save coal, hence.... The railroads have experimented with some success. They get perhaps 10 per cent of the heat energy from a ton shoveled beneath the locomotive boiler, 10 per cent of the total in the ton. They use one-quarter of all the coal mined. Next to labor this is the greatest expense which our railroads have. This shows how great the problem is to them. Some have adopted a system of paying a bonus for the greatest distance made on a given quantity of a given coal. But this laudable effort has not met with the cooperation that would be expected from the firemen, for reasons that go far afield. Industries, especially those which generate electric power, have made similar effort to gain from their fuel its greatest potentiality, and with varying success. We can overlook the stoking of the domestic furnace as a national concern, for the amount of coal used in this way amounts to not more than 17 per cent of the national coal bill, and this whole charge could be saved, it is estimated, by giving care to the 75 per cent of our coal which is burned under boilers to make steam. Here there is a maximum figure of 13 per cent of the energy of the coal put into harness, and the average is less than 10 per cent, even in the larger plants.

In one establishment visited by the fuel engineers of this department during the war a preventable waste of 40,000 tons a year was discovered. By changes in the admission of air to the furnaces and in the "baffling" of the boilers the engineers of the Bureau of Mines are confident that they have been able to increase the economy of coal in the ships of the Emergency Fleet Corporation by 16 per cent, making 6 pounds of coal do the work of 7. If such a percentage of economy could be generally effected it would mean the saving of as much coal as France and Italy together will need in this year of their greatest distress.