Environmental Impacts of Mining

1. Environmental Impacts of Mining Courtesy of Sarah Franchino

2. An Iraqi oil field where flares burn off flammable gases from oil wells and thick, black, crude oil pours from the ground

3. Peak Oil: the number and amount of new oil discoveries peaked in 1965 and has been declining since then

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5. Athabasca Region, Alberta Canada: the site of tar sands mining. Tar sands are called syn-fuels. An oily substance is mined from the ground and then converted to be used as oil

6. Overburden of vegetation, soil, and rock is removed to access the bitumen buried beneath.

8. The ore that is mined is mixed with hot water and chemicals to separate the bitumen from the sand and other materials; the waste is called tailings, and is poured into surface impoundments for storage

9. The bitumen extracted from the ore is shipped to upgrading facilities that separate the petroleum products based on density to be refined and sold

11. An offshore oil drilling platform. Much of the oil produced on U.S. soil is actually produced along the U.S. coastline.

12. On April 10, 2010 oil rig Deepwater Horizon suffers an explosion that spills more that 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico before the leaking oil well is plugged on July 15.

14. Exxon Valdez Oil Spill: 1989, Prince William Sound, Alaska • 10.8 million gallons of crude oil were spilled • 1,200 miles of coastline were coated in oil

15. Strip mining for lignite coal in Lausitz, Germany

16. Giant excavators move the overburden and pile it aside; coal is loaded onto a conveyer and sent to the power plant

17. The cost to transport coal is expensive, so massive amounts of coal are dug adjacent to power plants

18. Mountaintop removal mining is common in the Appalachian Mountains. Coal is shipped by train to power plants to generate electricity for American cities.

19. This is a common view of the Appalachian mountains prior to any mining activity.

20. Explosives are used to blast the overburden into pieces. Bulldozers and machines then push the rubble into the valleys

21. West Virginia: the dragline (crane) at work in this picture is 22-stories tall.

22. Even after a mine is reclaimed, the landscape of the area is permanently changed. Coal sludge surface impoundments remain to contain the waste materials from washing coal.

23. Acid mine drainage can stain nearby water orange with iron oxides and render water sources acidic and unusable.

24. Collapse of subsurface mine tunnels may lead to subsidence of the land above. This Pennsylvania coal mine caught fire in the 1960’s and is still burning: the town above it was abandoned as unsafe.

25. New methods of mining natural gas are known as Hydraulic Fracturing (fracking)

26. Surface impoundments contain waste water from fracking, but much of the fracking fluid is not recovered from the process.

28. Fracking in the Catskills