getting coal.out of ground capitalism ii game

When the elevator finally stops, on the seventh and deepest level of the mine, we file into a high-ceilinged room that looks like a subway platform. After an initial flutter in my stomach, the long minutes of the ride are marked only by a strong breeze through the elevator grilles and the loud rush of the shaft going by. The brakes release and, for a moment, we bob gently on the end of the mile-and-a-half long cable, like a boat in dock. “Like a motorcycle in a city,” says Christof Beicke, the public affairs officer for the Ruhr mining consortium, as the door rattles shut. The elevator that carries Germany’s last coal miners on their daily commute down the mine shaft travels at about 40 feet a second, nearly 30 miles an hour. If there’s an afterlife for retired coal mines, one that could put them to work for the next revolution in energy, it will have to come soon. Bottrop’s Prosper-Haniel coal mine is a symbol of the challenges and opportunities facing Germany - and coal-producing states everywhere.Īround the world, as governments shift away from the coal that fueled two ages of industrial revolution, more and more mines are falling silent. Wind turbines have sprung up among old shaft towers and coking plants as Germany strives to hit its renewable energy goals.īut the path from dirty coal to clean energy isn’t an easy one. Coal and steel plants have fallen quiet, one by one, over the course of the last half-century. The Ruhr Valley is in the midst of a remarkable transformation. Next year, that era will come to an end when this mine closes.

Some 500,000 miners once worked in the region’s nearly 200 mines, producing as much as 124 million tons of coal every year. It’s the only visible sign that, almost three quarters of a mile below, Germany’s last hard coal lies beneath this spot.īottrop sits in the Ruhr Valley, a dense stretch of towns and suburbs home to 5.5 million people. Looming above everything else is a green A-frame structure with four great pulley wheels to carry men and equipment into a mine shaft.

A quiet, two-lane road leads me through farm pasture to a cluster of anonymous, low-lying buildings set among the trees.

It’s a sunny October day on the outskirts of the west German town of Bottrop.

Getting coal.out of ground capitalism ii game