Chinese Buying up NEPA Anthracite?

Understand the steel making process. Iron is smelted and carbon is added usually in the form of coke to make pig iron. The coke is also a fuel in the smelting process. Coke is good quality Bit coal with the volitiles burned off so it is mostly carbon.

Pig iron is then melted in a basic oxygen process blast furnace to burn off the excess carbon to form steel. Too much carbon and the steel is brittle. Too little carbon and the steel is soft.

Anthracite is used in the smelting process in lieu of coke as a carbon additive and fuel as pointed out.

Making coke in an enviromentally friendly way is expensive. More likely the "people overseas" have a shortage of good quality bit coal for steel making and are buying anthracite for a substitute.

coal berner wrote:all the oil pump out of Alaska
goes to China & Japan we do not see a drop of that oil in the US

This isn't the first time I have heard this, but it is most certainly not correct. There is a law from 1973 that demands all oil pumped from Alaska stay in in the USA. It's called Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act of 1973. Go look it up if you need to. There was a short time when some was some exports found their way around this law, but at no time did they ever go over 7% of output.

Yes, the USA does export about a million and a half barrels a day, but most of it is either for geographical reasons or is finished products. (Think WD-40) The geographical is more or less traded. Let's say oil goes from Washington state to Canada. That same amount is now imported from Quebec to New York. (not actual examples) So, a certain percentage isn't really exported, it's just moved here & there for convenience reasons.

Steamup, some places may use a little pig iron in a BOP but it would be a lot more costly compared to scrap iron, I don't think there are any pig iron plants left in the U.S. but any blast furnace of iron foundry could produce it. Basically it would be left over iron that gets poured into small ingots, if I remember there are only a few differences in the makeup of the iron, it would be used more in foundry irons from electric furnaces, it reality it's just cast iron, much cheaper to use hot iron & scrap metal.

samhill wrote:Nope, no coal at all used in electric furnaces, it's a direct melting of scrap & additives to make the wanted recipe. They do as you can probably guess require a lot of power & that would come from coal fired power plants. They are probably leading the world in alternate power sources but are growing far faster than the power that is needed. From the Nat. Geographic story they are also becoming a quiet leader in green tech. development. They will be the force to be reckoned with, also unlike us they are investing in their infrastructure at an astounding pace. I wish I still had the mag. to be able to better recall.

I feel compelled to comment on many of the discussions here about China, but I won't (this time). A comment on infrastructure though; China is investing quite a bit into their roads, highways, bridges, buildings, etc..., that is because they didn't have it to begin with. In other words, we are mostly in a state of repairing ours, where China is building where there is none. I am not sure if you have been to China and what your feelings are about it if you have; but from my experiences, I wouldn't want the Chinese (or India) infrastructure here in the USA. We need to stop comparing ourselves to China, and instead look inwards at we can do to sustain our own way of life. I am sure none of us want to live like the Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, or any other developing nation.

When we were a developing nation we did the same, then we allowed our infrastructure to fall apart. We now have relatively modern bridges falling down & roads falling apart, how many gas line ruptures & fires have we been having? That's not even getting into the sewer & water lines, Bagdad has some nice newer ones on our dime, we got to get out of these places & take care of our own.

samhill wrote:When we were a developing nation we did the same, then we allowed our infrastructure to fall apart. We now have relatively modern bridges falling down & roads falling apart, how many gas line ruptures & fires have we been having? That's not even getting into the sewer & water lines, Bagdad has some nice newer ones on our dime, we got to get out of these places & take care of our own.

Agreed. We still have much higher standards than the previously mentioned countries, so that is something we should be proud of. Take a walk around Beijing sometime, the smell of sewer gas will make you want to vomit, and that is in a nicer area around the embassy's.

I did some research back on the original topic of Chinese buying Anthracite, and could not find a specific export amount by coal type. However, I did find coal exports by country:

http://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/
By the data, the US exports more coal to Japan than any other country; followed by Korea, Netherlands, Brazil, and China is fifth. Japan had the single largest increase from YTD 2010-2011, at 354%, where China's imports of US coal increased by 22.7% in that same period.
If we were talking metallurgical coal, Japan still leads all countries, including China by 80%, in importing US coal. I believe metallurgical coal is a specific type of bituminous, correct me if I am wrong.
So the EIA does not have data on specific coal types that I could find, but I think the data represents a different picture than the perception. I'm not saying China isn't attempting to secure a greater supply of coal through imports by any means. I understand China imported 12 million tons of coal from Mongolia in 2010.

I've got an engineer friend that set up a manufacturing plant in China to make a low end item in their product line. It's a very propriety product and manufacturing process. The low end product is the only one they were willing to risk being made in China. When he goes there, if the company can bribe him enough to do so, he takes and wears a respirator and face mask. Air pollution is absolutely awful in the manufacturing cities.

That's why they stopped a lot of their production before & during the Olympics but they are now working to correct much of that problem. They didn't bother to look at the problems that others had before them.

Freddy wrote:

coal berner wrote:all the oil pump out of Alaska
goes to China & Japan we do not see a drop of that oil in the US

This isn't the first time I have heard this, but it is most certainly not correct. There is a law from 1973 that demands all oil pumped from Alaska stay in in the USA. It's called Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act of 1973. Go look it up if you need to. There was a short time when some was some exports found their way around this law, but at no time did they ever go over 7% of output.

Yes, the USA does export about a million and a half barrels a day, but most of it is either for geographical reasons or is finished products. (Think WD-40) The geographical is more or less traded. Let's say oil goes from Washington state to Canada. That same amount is now imported from Quebec to New York. (not actual examples) So, a certain percentage isn't really exported, it's just moved here & there for convenience reasons.

<dead link removed>

http://www.dcourier.com/main.asp?ArticleID=56947& ... tionID=589

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/pipeline/peopleevent ... ption.html

coal berner wrote: <dead link removed>

http://www.dcourier.com/main.asp?Articl ... tionID=589

I didn't read all of the third link, but the first two agree with what I said.. very little leaves the country. The first link shows 2.7% exported.

Alaskan Oil Exports 1996 to 2004
Destination Amount (in million barrels)
South Korea 46.15
Japan 24.51
China 16.52
Taiwan 8.31
Total Exports 95.49
Total Alaskan Production 1996 to 2004 = 3,549 million barrels

ANSWER: Despite the opening of new fields, oil production in Alaska has steadily declined in recent years. The amount flowing through the trans-Alaska pipeline has fallen from a high of more than 2 million barrels a day in 1988 to 740,000 barrels a day in 2007, according to the Alyeska Pipeline Service Co.
After-tax profits go to the oil companies and royalties go to resource owners - mainly the state of Alaska, whose budget relies heavily on the money from oil production. About $2 billion in oil royalties went into the state's general fund this past year.
Other resource owners include the federal government and private landowners - parties that generally support drilling in ANWR because it would add to the dwindling supplies of the state's existing oil fields.
The crude oil that flows down the 800-mile pipeline is picked up by tankers in the port of Valdez. According to state officials, the bulk of the crude is transported to West Coast refineries, with a small percentage remaining in Alaska and an unknown amount going overseas.
According to the CIA's World Factbook, the U.S. exported 1.048 million barrels of crude per day in 2004 - which amounts to about 12 percent of domestic production - and imported 13.15 million barrels a day that same year. It's unclear how much of the exported oil originated in Alaska.
A group of oil companies paid for the pipeline to be built in the late 1970s at a cost of $8 billion. Interest holdings in the pipeline have changed hands several times and today three companies own much of the pipeline and most of Alaska's oil leases: BP PLC, Exxon Mobil Corp. and ConocoPhillips.

I'm not sure exactly where it's going, but dealers in the Hazleton, Pa. area are unable to fill all their orders. Told it's going overseas. One thought is it's going to our military bases over seas but I don't think they would use that much. We continue to be sold out.