Thought I'd pass along something totally new. This appeared on the yahoo groups water forum a few days ago. The date of the article is 12/30/02, and is available through http:\\www.deseretnews.com, a newspaper out of Salt Lake City. Might prove to be of interest in extinguishing coal mine fires prior to remediation.

George H.Davis Geotechnical Liaison Missouri Dept. of Transportation

CEU scientist wields tool to snuff coal fire dragons By Joe Bauman Deseret News staff writer

Hiding 70 feet below the surface of the ground, a dragon has been snorting out smoke and toxic fumes for about half a century. It overcame two attempts to kill it. Now a new Saint George finally may slay the beast.

Louis Amodt, senior reclamation specialist with the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining, watches while a driller injects a chemical mixture into a coal seam of an underground fire that has burned for up to 50 years.

Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining The dragon is a stubborn fire smoldering in a Carbon County coal seam, and the Saint George is George Uhlig, a science instructor at the College of Eastern Utah in Price. Uhlig has come up with a new chemical mixture that seems to promise to extinguish subterranean blazes in coal seams. Besides the Maclean mine fire in Spring Canyon near Helper, Carbon County, more than a dozen such blazes are releasing poisonous gas and posing hazards throughout Utah. Burning through abandoned coal mines, and even in coal seams that have not been mined, they are located in Carbon County, Emery County, Grand Staircase National Monument and elsewhere. "There's one outside Zion National Park," said Mark Mesch, manager of the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining program to reclaim abandoned mines. "So anywhere you have coal, there's that potential." About half are related to past mining work ? an explosion of coal dust, the overheating of mine machinery or some other mishap that started a blaze in a mine. Other fires are "what they refer to as outcrop fires. These are coal seams that have caught on fire naturally through spontaneous combustion or lightning strikes or things like that," he said. Lightning can strike where a coal seam breaks the surface of the ground, with the fire then spreading below. Often the fires do not just burn themselves out because they are slowly consuming a huge, blanketlike coal seam. The geology in the region is leaky, he said, and that lets air reach the fires and keep them burning. Although the fire is consuming coal below the surface, the effects can be felt by anyone who happens to live nearby or hike there. "If you are standing above the fire area, you will smell coal burning," said Mesch. "You will be affected by the fumes generated by the incomplete combustion of that material. "There will be toxic gases such as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and other gases that are being emitted into the atmosphere." It's a strange smell, he said. "You could be out in the middle of the wilderness or in the Grand Staircase and smell burning coal." In big ones like Maclean, smoke filters through the ground. In winter, the hot gas is visible as steam. Luci Malin, a senior reclamation specialist with the division, added, "You can really get a whiff. . . . It can start to give you a headache." That's particularly likely if one were to drive into Spring Canyon and get out of the car near the fire when an afternoon breeze is rolling down the canyon. She directed one of the two previous efforts to douse the Maclean fire, which Mesch estimates has been burning 40 or 50 years. This was an attempt that used a chimney device to channel it, and a foaming concrete material to extinguish it. The attempts didn't work. "It stinks. I purposely wore my oldest clothes" while visiting the scene, she said. "It permeates everything." Not only are the fires hazardous to people, wildlife and vegetation, but they burn up valuable coal reserves. The new effort to put them out is the brainchild of Uhlig, who teaches chemistry at CEU. He has developed a product called FEM-12, which is a mixture of material that seems to work quickly to put out blazes. Uhlig and student researchers have been experimenting with mixtures of inorganic salts that react in fire. He began his research eight or nine years ago. "In the presence of the heat of the fire, there's a reduction reaction that occurs, followed by an oxidation. And the oxidation reaction just literally sucks the oxygen out of the fire," said Uhlig. FEM-12 can be dissolved in water or used in powdered form. It prevents steam explosions that often follow an attempt to douse coal fires with water. In one experiment, the researchers were called to try to put out a fire in zirconium waste. Flames were jumping 8 or 10 feet high. It was "just hotter than blue blazes," he said. "One shovelful of the material, dry, knocked that flame down and you couldn't find that flame anymore." With another 60 or 70 pounds of the material the fire was out. In October and November, division officials and drilling contractors worked to bore holes into the heart of the Maclean dragon. They sank 24 drill holes, and 11 went into the burning section. "We actually drilled right into the fire front, which was at 70 feet down beneath the surface," Mesch said. "And into 11 holes we injected 8,000 gallons of a fire-extinguishing substance." FEM-12 may have done the job. "We're not sure, but we're having very positive results from this effort," he added. When the drills reached the fire front, the heat was so intense that it melted a drill bit. That meant it was at least in the neighborhood of 800 degrees. Some of the hot spots were over 1,000 degrees, he estimated. When the FEM-12 reached the fire, "we saw the temperatures drop dramatically." Mesch added that the division has been monitoring the temperature since then, using thermocouples in the drill holes. In some holes the heat dropped by 200 degrees. In others the reduction was less. That the temperature didn't immediately drop to background level is not discouraging to the battlers of these odd fires. "If you have 70 feet of overburden on top of some burning area, the dissipation of that heat is generally a very slow process," he said. "And to have these temperatures drop so dramatically, so quickly, is an extremely positive sign." The Maclean temperatures will be tracked into the spring or summer. Mesch noted, "If we continue to see the decrease in the temperature, then that's going to say to us that this material we've used is actually working." Malin said if the division can find a method that works, it will use it on some of the other coal fires. Uhlig has no doubts about the value of FEM- 12. "It's not an attempt," he said. "It works."