Dam Crazy for White Coal in the New South - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 24

livered by the Duke network. Duke Power executives were formidable economic players
eager to feed the Piedmont's industrial base with energy derived from a changing southern
waterscape. 8
So why did Duke and his contemporaries in the Southeast initially cast their lot with
white coal instead of rock coal? The Northeast and Rocky Mountain West had turned to
fossil fuels—heavy fuel oil and coal—before and after the American Civil War as canal,
railroad, pipeline, and coal mining operations shared corporate ownership and evolved in
tandem. 9 Southeastern energy history was equally complicated and for different reasons.
Pennsylvania, Alabama, and southwest Virginia miners cut bituminous coal for southern
railroads, municipal waterworks, the metallurgical industry, the electric industry, and other
heavy manufacturing regions stretching from the Carolinas to Texas that were coal and oil
poor before the 1890s. New energy sources soon emerged as the clear winners in the early
twentieth century, leading these regions to turn to alternative fossil or organic fuel sources.
For example, Los Angeles and Houston declared energy independence from expensive coal
imports from Canada, Australia, and Pennsylvania and tied their economic futures to loc-
ally available heavy fuel oil or natural gas after 1900. 10
Southeastern railroads, factories, and homes certainly burned Alabama coal between
1890 and 1925, but coal was not yet king. 11 Alabama was the only major coal-producing
state south of Tennessee and Virginia, and in 1900, Alabama produced a mere 8.3 million
tons of coal when national production hovered just under 270 million tons. By 1929,
Alabama had increased production to 17.7 million tons when national production surpassed
600 million tons. 12 And, Alabama's coalfields primarily supplied the state's Birmingham-
centered metallurgical industry. At least one transnational railroad executive considered
Alabama coal supplies unreliable and “of uneven quality” as locomotive fuel. 13 Other
southern cities, from Atlanta to Charlotte, were hamstrung by coal's freight costs, partic-
ularly when post-World War I global demands sent the price of coal sky-high after 1919.
Coal costs and fuel efficiency were frequent topics among Georgia railroad managers,
whose company publications implored white and black employees to monitor their own
coal handling. 14 Furthermore, the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century coal sec-
tor was plagued with labor strikes and by poor management. For example, the coalfield
wars and United Mine Workers' organized national strikes in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and
Alabama between 1890 and 1920 affected coal production, shipments, and markets. 15 In
this context, coal supplies, deliveries, and costs were unpredictable when workers went on
strike. This volatile muscle-powered and mineral-fueled market helped New South capit-
alists make a choice and shift from soot-producing coal as a primary energy source to a
renewable organic energy environment that eliminated some variables. The new fuel in the
Southeast was the old waterpower transformed into slick hydroelectricity generated with
white coal.