Coal Acid Mine Drainage – Passive Treatment Lime Compost Drains – Three abandoned coal mined sites in Southern Illinois
Abstract:
Coal mining has been occurring in the United States, in earnest, for well over two hundred years. It has been estimated that 5.5 billion tonnes of coal have been mined in Illinois from 1883 to 2004. As a result of this historic industry, legacy coal mining environmental impacts continue to affiict Illinois’ communities and landscape. This is evidenced by the three different abandoned coal mine sites significantly affected by acid mine drainage presented below. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the implemented passive treatments at these three project sites. These constructed passive treatments should simply be considered practical case studies, where legacy acid mine drainage needed abatement, but due several constraints, no other type of treatment was to be considered. These case studies present some long-term positive results of the implemented passive treatment systems. Recom- mendations for future construction, modelling of these systems to offer improvements in sizing, based on f low and acid mine discharge chemical characteristics, as well as additional research on the use of different construction materials are proposed.
