6 ms·
Every second a million lbs of coal gets mined? Hard to fathom.
by wordsinaline 2y ago
Every second a million lbs of coal gets mined? Hard to fathom.
- gavmor 2y agoYeah, let's think about that. In this video[0] of an open-pit mine, Sempertrans claims their conveyors move 6 meters per second,and elsewhere[1] they claim to move 18,000 tons an hour, ie 5 tons per second—just under 1 ton per meter of belt? It must be pretty dense, something like ~800kg/m^2? That checks out for cubes of lignite. So only 198,000 such conveyors are needed in world. 0. https://youtu.be/b0JqGy-rs2I https://youtu.be/b0JqGy-rs2I 1. https://easyengineering.eu/interview-with-sempertrans/ https://easyengineering.eu/interview-with-sempertrans/
- its_ethan 2y agoNot sure what math gets you to 198,000 belts needed? If this belt can do 5 tons per second, that's 10,000 lbs per second per belt So to reach 1,000,000 lbs/s globally, you would do: 1,000,000 lbs/s divided by 10,000 lbs/s/belt = 100 belts No?
- gavmor 2y agoMakes sense. Can't tell you what I was thinking, since the cache has cleared. ;)
- abecedarius 2y agoLet's see what that means. There are ~2000 lbs/ton, so 500 tons/second. Search returns "On average, a ton of coal produces 21 to 22 gigajoules of energy." That'd imply about 1 TW worth of coal. https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-coal-power-plants/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-coal-power-plants/ says it's 2 TW currently generated, which is (barely) within a factor of two of this. There are ~3e7 seconds in a year, so 1.5e10 tons/year. If a ton is a bit under a cubic meter, this'd be very roughly a cube of >2km on a side.