Open Source Coal is a collaborative effort to synthesize and share information about coal that is crucial for making informed decisions about the future of America’s energy policy. The site provides the most extensive database about coal production, consumption, prices and reserves that has ever been made publicly available and provides easy to use resources to query the database and share compelling graphs, maps and tables, not just on the website, but from anywhere on the web.

Development of the database and the website is guided by the need to address pressing real-world questions, the answers to which have proven elusive using publicly available data sources.

On the Open Source Coal Blog you will find some of those guiding questions that have come up just in the last few months. In most of the blog posts, you can click the embedded image to view an interactive chart or click the link below the image to see exactly how the query was performed.

General Information about Open Source Coal

OpenSourceCoal.org consists of two main components – a blog and a database with a variety of “datafinders,” or custom tools for making specific types of queries to the database. The blog portion will be used solely for sharing analyses of important questions about coal and is intended to provide a credible forum for serious and substantive discussion about coal. Blog posts also serve to demonstrate how to use the various data-querying and information-sharing tools on OpenSourceCoal.org to answer real world questions.

The other main component, the OpenSourceCoal database, is built on a backbone of public coal production, price, quality, employment and consumption data from the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), the Energy Information Administration (EIA), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as well as mine permit data from state agencies, corporate ownership data from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), coal export and import data from the US Census Bureau’s Foreign Trade Division, and coal reserve estimates from the US Geologic Survey and various state-level geologic agencies.

Do you have coal questions that you have had difficulty answering? Post a question to the “Coal Questions” blog and, hopefully, someone in the Open Source Coal community will be able to help out.

For specific questions, or if your organization would be interested in participating in the Open Source Coal project, contact Matt Wasson at matt@appvoices.org.