Energy Capitals: Local Impact, Global Influence

1. Pittsburgh as an Energy Capital: Perspectives on Coal and Natural Gas Transitions and the Environment

5 Throughout most of its history Pittsburgh has been closely identified with the fossil fuel coal as a source of both industrial progress and of environmental degradation. Located on top of the high-quality Pittsburgh bituminous coal seam, the city’s businesses, industries, residents, railroads, and steamboats benefited from the high-energy and easily available fuel. Coal has shaped the pattern of industrial development, settlement, population, and labor force composition. Its mining and consumption also drove the environmental contamination and physical alteration of land and water, as well as seriously polluting the air. Without coal and the advantages of its location, Pittsburgh would not have become one of the world’s great industrial powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 The tentacles of the city’s industrial and financial interests and its ecological footprint spread throughout the region, tying its hinterland ever closer to the city. The full energy history of Pittsburgh, however, encompasses more than coal. The city, for instance, played a prominent role in the coal-oil industry in the late 1850s and early 1860s and in the petroleum industry soon after that, becoming the nation’s oil refining center for approximately fifteen years. More recently, in the post–World War II decades, it played a prominent role in the development of Joel A. Tarr and Karen Clay Pittsburgh as an Energy Capital Perspectives on Coal and Natural Gas Transitions and the Environment 1 6 Joel A. Tarr and Karen Clay nuclear energy.2 But the most significant aspects of Pittsburgh’s energy history are those involving transitions between coal and natural gas. The first of these transitions was relatively short-lived, taking place approximately between 1880 and 1890. The second has been more lasting, and began in the years after World War II and continues today. These energy transitions had significant impacts upon the city’s population, industries , and environment. They also shaped public policy and public health.3 The transitions were primarily driven by costs and supply factors, but they were aided by the city’s attempt to devise policies to escape from coal’s environmental externalities and to find a substitute that would provide its energy needs. Today extensive debates about both coal and natural gas development in terms of their effects on both the environment and the public health have reemerged, reminding us of the importance of understanding our energy history. This chapter is organized in the following manner. The first section, The Landscapes of Coal, will consider the development of coal mining, infrastructure necessary for its operation, and the evolution of transportation systems for moving coal to national and international markets. The second section, The Landscapes of Industry, will examine those industries most tightly linked to coal, especially iron and steel. The third section, The Environmental Effects of Coal will explore coal from mining through consumption. The fourth section will discuss The First Transition to Natural Gas. The fifth section will consider The Environmental Effects of Natural Gas. The sixth section will present The Return to Coal and Smoke, after natural gas supplies dropped, and the seventh section, Smoke Control, will examine the second shift from coal to natural gas that occurred from 1945 to 1960 and its impacts on the city and the region from different perspectives. The final section looks at the effects of this energy transition. The Landscapes of Coal The Pittsburgh coal seam before its exploitation was approximately 14,200 square miles in area, covering parts of twelve counties. The seam extended northward from the southwest corner of the state to Lake Erie and the southern New York State boundary and to the Allegheny Front on the east, and was composed of a number of different beds. The bituminous coal lay primarily in horizontal seams approximately three to four feet thick, located on the side of hills and at the bottom of valleys, with relatively little deep mining initially required to extract it.4 The coal seam was first exposed on Pittsburgh hillsides, and further rich deposits were soon discovered extending into the city’s hinterland along the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers and their tributaries.5 Bituminous production expanded greatly after the Civil War, as water and rail connections improved .6 During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Pennsylvania was Pittsburgh as an Energy Capital 7 the leading producer of bituminous coal, most of it coming from the Pittsburgh coal seam. The center of...