Here and abroad, there has been talk of such a conduit for more than a decade, and a few short pilot models were put to trial; but the 108-mile-long, 10-inch tube which now connects the strip mines around Cadiz, Ohio, with the great lakeshore power plant at Eastlake, on the outskirts of Cleveland, is the first of its kind actually to be put to work.
Completed in 1947 at a cost of $10 million, this installation, above ground and below, is not greatly different from pipelines transporting oil and gas, coal's chief competitors among the fossil fuels. Underground, the main difference lies in pipes so constructed as to resist abrasion from the "slurry"—powdered coal suspended in water—with a cutting power on metal comparable to that of emery-cloth.
Three pumping stations lift the slurry upgrade and across the rolling farmland of northeastern Ohio. Delivery from strip mine to power plant takes a day and a half, at a cost conservatively reckoned to be less than half that of transport by truck or railroad "gondola."
At the delivery end of the line the coal dust is dewatered and blown into the furnaces. The principal railroads thus undercut—the Pennsylvania, New York Central, and Nickel Plate—having watched this development closely—appear to have acted according to the adage: "If you can't lick 'em, jine 'em," by acquiring sizable stock-holdings in this new line. If, as seems likely, more such lines are laid, they could cut a real figure in the competitive conflict between coal, oil, and gas, and between traffic by rail, truck and barge as well.
A version of this article appeared in print in the February 1960 issue of Resources magazine.
