Germany's hard coal deposits

Germany lacks large amounts of natural resources with the exception of coal. The country has large deposits of anthracite and bituminous coal, also known as black or hard coal, located in the Ruhr and Saarland, and large deposits of lignite, or brown coal, located in Leipziger Bucht and Niederlausitz.

The Country

Germany is located in central Europe. It is bordered in the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; in the west by the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Luxembourg; in the south by Switzerland and Austria; and in the east by Poland, the Czech Republic, and Austria. Germany is primarily a country of basins, hills, and high and low plains except for the Harz Mountains in the central highlands and the Bavarian Alps in the south. Germany has an abundance of rivers, including the Elbe, the Oder, and the Danube, which is the second largest river in Europe.

Germany has the largest economy in Europe and the fifth largest in the world, based on purchasing power parity, in 2017. Germany is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. Its economy is basically one of free enterprise, though government control exists in some sectors. A major exporter, Germany ranks among the world’s largest producers of iron, steel, coal, and cement. In 2016, Germany was ranked third in both exports and imports in the world. Germany’s main trading partners are European Union members, the United States, and China.

Hard Coal

Coal is a fossil fuel containing carbon. Hard coal, also called black coal, is either bituminous or anthracite, depending on the percentage of carbon it contains. Bituminous coal contains 45 to 86 percent carbon; anthracite has a higher percentage of carbon, ranging from 86 to 97 percent.

In Germany, anthracite and bituminous are found in the Ruhr and in Saarland. In 2005, Germany had 152 million metric tons of anthracite and bituminous reserves; in 2016, an estimated 40,548 metric tons of recoverable hard coal remained, according to the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources. Both anthracite and bituminous require underground mining. In the 1950’s, hard-coal mining in Germany was at its peak. The mines produced 136 million metric tons. Since that time, the amount of coal mined has decreased considerably. In 2005, 23.2 million metric tons were mined; in 2017, the amount extracted fell to 3.7 million metric tons. The reduction in hard-coal mining has been because hard coal could be imported more cheaply than it could be mined domestically. The industry has been subsidized by the government in order to be profitable. However, in 2005, 20 percent of electricity in Germany was still generated by burning domestically mined black coal. In addition, the steel industry used 5.4 million metric tons of the 2005 production total. Also in 2005, Germany imported 40,898 metric tons of coal; in 2017, the amount of hard coal imported rose to 50.3 million metric tons.

Environmental concerns and European Union policies and directives have caused problems for Germany’s hard-coal mining industry. Land destruction and water pollution are the primary environmental concerns. The problem of greenhouse gases is also of great importance. When burned, coal emits considerable amounts of carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, and significant amounts of sulfur, nitrous oxide, and mercury. Because of the pollutants created by both mining and burning the coal, Germany has attempted to replace coal as a major energy resource with cleaner fuels, such as natural gas or biogas or solar, wind, or hydropower. The government of Germany has set several goals for using renewable energy sources. In 2000, the German government established a goal to produce 4.5 percent of its primary energy consumption from renewable sources by 2010. The proposed goal for 2050 is that one-half of the energy will be provided by renewable sources. In 2007, the German government decided to phase out the mining of hard coal starting in 2009. The plan was to be completed by the end of 2018.

In January, 2007, when the government and the mining companies agreed to ceasing the production of coal, eight underground mines still produced hard coal. Seven of them were located in the Ruhr industrial region, and one was in Saarland. Coal mining has long been a significant industry in Germany, and opposition exists to the elimination of underground mining. In 2007, the underground mines provided employment for about 33,000 people. This creates unemployment and retirement-benefits problems. The underground mines and the companies involved in this type of mining also play an important role in the country’s economy as a base for the mining equipment industry. Germany has been a world leader in the manufacture and export of such equipment. A final complication is that phasing out the mines in 2018 has made Germany nearly totally dependent on imports for coal.

Lignite

Lignite, also called brown coal, is a fossil fuel that requires considerable processing before it is suitable for burning. It has a high moisture content and crumbles easily. It has a much lower heating value than hard coal. Almost 5 metric tons of lignite are needed to produce as much energy as 1 metric ton of hard coal. However, lignite has played an important role in the German economy, especially in that of East Germany before the reunification of the country, and still provides a considerable number of jobs. There are significant lignite reserves located in the Leipziger Bucht and Niederlausitz regions. Lignite is extracted by strip-mining, which causes extensive environmental damage. The processing of lignite produces large amounts of greenhouse gases. The intensive mining of lignite by East Germany caused severe damage to the forests, lakes, and rivers in the areas where mining occurred and damage, to a lesser degree, throughout Germany and neighboring countries. Beginning in 1990 there was a reduction in the use of lignite. Because of its detrimental effect upon the environment, lignite mining could be banned by Germany and the European Union. However, there are significant economic reasons for continuing to mine lignite. The cost of lignite is well below the world market price for other coals. It is less expensive to produce because it can be strip-mined, and the lignite industry provides a large number of jobs. Lignite has provided an inexpensive domestic source of energy for Germany and supplied 22 percent of Germany’s electric power in 2017. Anthracite, bituminous, and lignite coal together furnished 37 percent of Germany’s energy needs that year.

Potash

Potash is used primarily in making fertilizers. It is produced from various potassium compounds in which the potassium is water soluble, including potassium carbonate and potassium oxide. Potash is produced from either underground mines, which are the most common, or solution mining. It is then milled and refined in processing plants, which separate the potassium chloride from the halite (salt) and process it into potash. Potash is found in the central part of western Germany and southern Germany. In the west, it is located in the Werra-Fulda district. In the Zechstein basin, there are six potash mines. All of the mines are under the ownership of K+S GmbH. In 2016, Germany ranked among the top ten countries in potash production. That year, Germany produced 2.8 million metric tons of potash. Traditionally, the world potash market has been one with a surplus of product; however, most believe that the demand will increase and raise the profitability of potash mining. This belief is based on the increasing world population; the increasing consumption of meat, requiring more animal feedstuffs; and the diminishing amount of land available for farming, which, in turn, must be fertilized more intensely for greater production.

Natural Gas and Biogas

Natural gas is a fossil fuel. It is a combustible mixture of hydrocarbon gases, primarily methane. When it is almost pure methane, it is referred to as dry gas. Natural gas is commonly found in the same areas as deposits of oil. It is clean burning and emits lower levels of pollutants into the air than other fossil fuels. Germany had 41.9 billion cubic meters of natural gas reserves, as of 2017. In 2015, Germany produced 8.73 billion cubic meters of natural gas but consumed 81.35 billion cubic meters. Thus, the country’s production fell drastically short of providing for its natural gas needs. Germany imported 102.5 billion cubic meters that year. Thus, Germany ranked second in the world in imports of natural gas. Of the natural gas imported by Germany, most comes from Norway, Italy, and Finland. Germany also serves as the major hub of a pipeline system that brings natural gas from Russia into Europe.

Germany and other members of the European Union are concerned about their large dependency on imported natural gas to meet such a large portion of domestic energy needs. Consequently, the European Union is investigating the use of renewable resources. Germany is one of the leaders in the plan to replace imported natural gas with biogas generated by European Union countries. Biogas is a bio-based methane that is produced from three different sources: landfill gas, sewage sludge gas, and agricultural waste and similar matter. In Germany, biogas, as a renewable energy resource, has received a great deal attention and development. Of the energy derived by Germany from renewable resources, 27 percent was from biogas in 2016; only wind outranks biogas as a renewable energy resource in Germany’s energy production. In 2016, Germany accounted for about 28 percent of the biogas produced in the European Union. The total amount of biogas produced by Germany was 58 terawatt-hours (billion kilowatt-hours). The sources from which biogas was produced were landfill gas (approximately 0.2 percent of total electricity generation), sewage sludge gas (approximately 0.8 percent), and agricultural waste and similar waste types (approximately 3.1 percent). Germany has proposed a goal to provide 10 percent of its total gas consumption from biogas by 2030.

Crude Oil

Crude oil is a fossil fuel; the term “crude oil” refers to the oil before it is processed. In 2016, Germany ranked fifty-fifth in crude oil production and ninth in consumption of refined petroleum products among countries. Germany ranked sixth in imports and sixty-seventh in exports. In 2006, Germany imported the majority of its oil from Russia, Norway, and Libya. As of 2017, Germany had an estimated 145,400,000 million barrels of oil in proven reserves and ranked sixty-sixth in the world in proven reserves. The north and northeastern regions of Germany are the primary locations of these reserves. Oil accounted for 34 percent of the primary energy consumption in Germany in 2015. Domestic production accounts only a fraction of the oil used in Germany. Germany produced 46,590 barrels of crude oil and 2.198 million barrels of refined petroleum products per day in 2016; by contrast, the country consumed 2.41 million barrels of refined oil per day that year. Germany’s largest crude oil deposit is at Mittelplate, off the German North Sea coast. Germany also has oil fields located at Emlichheim in Lower Saxony and at Aitingen, south of Augsburg. Although Germany does not have large crude oil deposits, it affords certain advantages in oil exploration. The price of crude oil is generally higher than elsewhere. Furthermore, the geological conditions present in the oil fields make them excellent places to develop new technologies and to solve problems of extracting oil. The German oil fields have been one of the major places where steam-flooding techniques and horizontal drilling have been used and perfected.

Hydropower

Hydropower uses the force of water to generate electricity. There are three types of hydropower stations: run-of-the-river, impoundment, and pump-storage plants. Run-of-the-river is the most common type. Pump-storage plants are the most efficient for controlling energy output and producing more electricity at peak periods of need, but impoundment and run-of-the river provide some storage electricity output. Germany has used hydropower as a source of energy for more than one hundred years. With Germany’s lack of fossil fuels, concerns about greenhouse-gas emissions and the ever-increasing cost of fossil fuels, hydropower is and will remain an important source of electricity in Germany. However, much of the new hydropower capacity will probably be provided by mini-hydropower stations (below 1 megawatt) because of environmental concerns about both the damage done to wildlife and flora by the creation of dams and the impact of changing the flow of rivers. As of 2016, Germany had a total installed capacity of 4.6 gigawatt-hours. The 20 terawatt-hours of electricity generated by hydropower provided about 3.7 percent of the electricity Germany consumed. Germany’s long history of using hydropower and of developing designs and technology for hydropower plants has made the country a major contributor to hydropower projects throughout the world.

Wind Power

Wind power harnesses the force of the wind through the use of windmills and turbines. Germany ranked third in the world in the use of energy derived from wind as of 2016. In the past, the noise created by the turbines used in the wind stations limited the places where they could be located. With the development of quieter generators, the acceptability of wind stations has increased greatly. Thus, wind stations can be located in the most favorable areas for efficient production of wind energy. In 2016, Germany produced 78.6 terawatt-hours from wind power, 11.2 percent of which came from onshore wind stations and 2.1 percent from offshore wind farms. Some of the tallest wind energy systems in the world are located in Germany. The system in Gaildorf reaches a height of 246.5 meters, for instance, and was designed to generate 10,500 megawatt-hours of electricity annually. The German wind systems are among the most powerful wind energy systems in the world. German scientists and engineers have built wind-operated generators with and without gears, and they have developed technologies which have enabled the use of wind power throughout the world.

Iron Ore

Iron ore consists of iron, other minerals, and rock. It varies in color by its composition and may be light yellow, reddish brown, purple, or even gray. The ore is graded as high or low according to the amount of iron it contains. Any ore that contains less than 54 percent iron is assessed as low-grade ore. Germany’s iron ore is almost entirely low-grade. The largest deposit of iron ore in Germany is southwest of Brunswick in the Harz Mountains. The ore is no longer mined. During the 1980’s, Germany did considerable mining of iron ore. The output of iron ore reached its peak at 95,200 metric tons in 1989. Germany now imports the iron ore used in its thriving steel industry. According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), Germany imported $130 million worth of iron ore from South Africa in 2016. The iron ore exported to Germany accounts for about 3 percent of the iron ore exported by South Africa.

Other Resources

Salt (NaCl) is an important resource in Germany. Salt for fertilizer and industrial uses is found in several areas in Germany, including Hesse, Thuringia, and Saxony, where the mining is often done at considerable depths (1,000 meters). rock salt mined in limestone areas is used to produce table-grade salt. The Stetten Salt Mine near Haigerloch produces approximately 500,000 metric tons of salt annually.

Germany also ranked first among in the European Union in the production of kaolin, a fine clay used to manufacture porcelain and coated paper. Germany is also a leading producer of feldspar, which is used in both the glass and ceramic industries, and of crude gypsum, barite, and bentonite.

Bibliography

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