West Virgina Public Broadcasting:

The report is one of the many that USGS has published assessing the nation’s coal resources. But this report focuses on the entire country, not just individual basins.

Brenda Pierce is the program coordinator of USGS’ energy resources program. She says the report is the first entirely digital look at coal resources. Her team spent years putting data into Geographic Information Systems databases.

The report focuses on coal “resources,” which is a term that refers to all the coal that’s in the ground. Only a relatively small subset of the coal in the ground is technically recoverable or economically recoverable at any one time.

USGS_Coal_Resource_Assessment –