The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, November 1, 1917, Page 12

T IV T Y s e ey - Make Lignite a National Asset State Engineer Discusses Possibilities of Solving Coal Shortage in Northwest—Lignite Is Good to Burn Even Without Treatment BY HERBERT HARD, North Dakota'State Drainage Engineer. GRIEAT opportunity for na- tional economy lies in the use of coal, food and other resources close at home. Present extortionate prices of coal, and the ominous threat of a coal- less winter in the Northwest, bring us taut up against the need of eco- nomical use of local fuels. North Dakota mine owners, railroads and consumers are grievously at fault if our native resources are not put to best use. North Dakota and neigh- boring states have enormous supplies of lignite. Three reasons for our failure to de- velop this wondrous wealth lie, first, in the discriminatfon of our railroads against it in preference to the lucrative haul of Eastern coals; second, the miners have put lignite on the market in an unusable form; third, the people The Leader has had articles before about lig- nite, the great fuel resource of the Northwest, now going to waste while the railroads are making big profits hauling in Eastern coal. Mr. Hard knows about lignite and he here tells an interesting story about its possibilities and the methods of using it. You can not under- stand economic conditions in the Northwest unless you know about lignite. will load up our lignite and tax the consumer in the Hocking wvalley for transporting it over the same lines to them. All this for the want of a spirit of co-operation and a few thousand nite shows on analysis 35 to 40 per cent of water, This water is of no fuel value and must be lost by. drying, which in any case now has great dis- advantages. If it dries before burning, Eastern coal being unloaded from cars in the Northwest to he left in huge piles as reserves for railroads. The railroads have taken no chance on a coal shortage and these great piles of coal are strung all along their tracks in the Northwest. have been reluctant to promote its use. Further it appears that the Great Northern line is guilty of a deplorable stand-off with other roads in refusing to allow its cars to be spotted at lignite mines on other roads. This is fully verified in its correspondence with the . protesting miners and state railroad commission. Patriotism is a lost virtue 'with this corporation. VAST AREAS CONTAIN LIGNITE IN NORTH DAKOTA One mine on the Soo line has 75 per cent of its customers on Great North- . ern lines, which it can't reach on ac- . count of this road war. The roads should co-operate with the miners and the public in a wartime campaign to make the use of our lignite general throughout the Northwest. They should be glad to operate with little profit. If they show genuine patriotism in fur nishing the product cheaply, the pub- lic will use their coal and warrant the development of the two manufacturing processes that will make it the best possible fuel. be developed. Thirty-two ‘thousand square miles of ' North Dakota, about half the area of the state, is underlaid by workable seams of lignite 'coal. These seams, one to five in number, overlie one another at comparatively shallow but varying depths. No seam under three feet in thickness is taken into account and many beds are 15 to 25 feet thick. The greatest thickness observed is 35 feet in Billings county, where it is a common sight to see exposed, in a 150- foot bluff, two or three coal beds 25 feet in thickness. Here is an inex- haustible wealth of coal upon which the state will soon depend, and which has always been a boon to the settler. The past and present business sys- Incidentally, one of the great future industries of the state will dollars to develop the lignite market in the producing states. Nor is information lacking to put the lignite on the market in usable form. Considerable research work has been done by state and federal scientists in quest of suitable preparation of the coal, and ir devising suitable stoves and boiler grates for' its consumption. As pointed out in recent Leader arti- cles briquettes are now being made of high thermal or heat giving power. The lignite is partiailly coked, the gas- eous madlter driven off and the solid coke-like residue compressed - into cakes or briquettes which rival anthra- cite in heating capacity. Here it should be noted that the gas content of lignite is very high, and in driving it off, a tremendous loss is ineurred, as there is now little use for the gas outside of that consumed in the briquetting plant to heat more coal. The vast bulk of this valuable gas fuel is allowed to es- cape into the air. , . Locate the coking plant near a city . and the gas may be used for city serv- .ice. When our lignite industry comes {into its own, pipe lines will carry 'gas :to town, or mills and factories will , consume it on the “ground. later grain may be milled in the nearby, . lignite. fields. IN NATURAL STATE e CAN-USE LIGNITE ; Lignite ‘'will be coked in the eastern: " part of the state to a large extent, and : made to supplement the water power, " developed - through the spring meonths at large dams, constructed for flood control in the Sheyenne and Pembina valleys, as at Lisbon and Valley City. These and other towns are destined to become milling centers in due time, thanks to their location at points' of ' eritical’ value for working out the vast " scheme of flood control and reclama- tem permits the transcontinental rail.: lines to drag Hocking and Pocohontas coals 1200 miles from. their native mines into the distant western lignite - - region. The haul nets them several hundred per cent over the eastern re- tail prite of coal. SPECIAL GRATES FOR USE OF LIGNITE After the. wealth of bituminous coal has become exhausted the same lines tion of the Red River valley. Not only will raw lignite be concen= trated for marketing by briquetting, but it will be dried without slacking at the mines, shipped at a third less freight cost and be sold in a form usa- ble even for the kitchen cook stove. This too has been worked out by scientists and offers bright prospect for making lignite far more popular than it now is. It is a well known fact that raw lig- A liftle the coal “slacks” and is of low value. If raw lignite is put into a fire pobt, the heat consumed to boil off or vaporize the 35 per cent of water is practically all lost. Of course much of the water dries out between mine and furnace. If the . water content is reduced from 35 to 16 per cent before the coal is shipped, the saving in freight is a large percentage. SMALL EVEN LUMPS ARE BEST TO BURN In carefully worked tests on a com< mercial scale it has been proven that if raw lignite is first broken or crushed to pieces not to exceed three inches across, they will lose the bulk of water quickly without much slacking, and leave a handy usable commercial lump. The average housewife or fur- nace stoker will not tackle with an ax an 80-pound lump of wet lignite, with the'purpose of reducing it to a stove size, but will quickly see the ad- vantage of purchasing ready prepared on the market a lump of usable size. Not only is a small lump convenient to use, but boiler practice requires it, - To get maximum heat effect it is ne- cessary to have the whole content of the fire pot composed of uniformly heated and actually burning fuel Plainly this is impossible in a furnace or stove which is to any extent octcu- - pied by large solid pieces of raw lignite which are only burning on the outside. Broken to small size the coal soon becomes ignited throughout the entire mass and gives several hundred + per cent more heat. Cracking coalgat the mine will re- quire extensive drying yards, which ~ will amply repay the extra handling by reduced freight on a popularized prod- uct. Stove manufacturers have realized the great future of western lignite and have already largely met its require- ments for special types of stoves, grates and boilers. In his seven years in state and federal work in North Da- kota, the writer has investigated the lignite mine resources, methods of marketing, manufacture and use, and freely volunteers to make any informa- tion generally available on request. Bank Examiner Gives Warning Practice of Some Bankers in Refusing to Honor Farmers’ Checks Must Be Stopped Says Waters N several states in which farmers are organizing into the Nonpartisan league small town bankers have sought by every method, legal and ille- gal, to prevent organization work be« ing carried on. One of their most fre- quent schemes has been, when checks payable to the Nonpartisan league for memberships have been presented for payment, to refuse payment and then call up the makers of the checks and urge them to repudiate their paper. Most of the farmers who have thus been asked to repudiate their own checks have refused, and their en- thusiasm for the League has been in- creased by this evidence of .the stand of the bankers, but this practice on the part of the bankers has caused trouble for the organization depart- ment in many states. In North Dakota, however, the farm- ers have a bank examiner of their own on the job in J. R. Waters. When re- ports began to come to Mr. Waters . that some North Dakota banks were proceeding, he . proceeded at once to serve mnotice on . adopting this illegal all state banks that any bank pursu- ing such illegal tactics was in grave danger of prosecution under the bank- ing laws, which may involve loss of itg charter. * Farmers, Mr. Waters said, are capable of knowing what they are doing when they join an organiza- tion' and the bankers of North Da- kota are not to be recognized as 'c_hg_guardians of the farmers" po- litics, as they were in the “good old days” of the old gang. & This is the letter written by Mr. Waters. It 'is another argument to show the difference between a state where the farmers choose their offi- cials and states where the politiciang choose them: State Banking Board, Bismarck, N. D, To the State Banks of North Dakota. PAGE TWELVE e Gentlemen: Reports have come ‘to the bank .examiner that certain banks in this state have, taken it upon themselves to refuse to pay checks made-payable to different individuals, associations or . corporations, drawn by men _having money upon deposit, upon the ostensi- ble plea that the checks were obtained ‘by means of misrepresentation, fraud or other illegal means. Affidavits have been filed by some of the payees of these checks and by the drawers of the checks that, even though the drawer of the check had ' thousands of dollars in the bank, the cashier of the bank has, without any instructions from the drawer refused payment of the check, which in many cases were for small amounts, evidente ly upon the theory that the banker was the guardian of the drawer of the check and that the drawer of the check did not know what he was doing when he signed the same. : You are hereby notified that heree after siich conduct on the part of any cashier or other officer of any bank \;vill not be tolerated by this departe ment. This department believes thag the farmers and others of this state know what they are doing when they draw checks. 2 The refusal on the part of any officer of any bank in this state to pay such checks is a violation of the state banking laws and the same will be enforced. In order that there may be no mise understanding about this matter I wish to state that checks payable to the Nonpartisan league or any organizes thereof constitute some of the ine stances of this kind. % . Affidavits which have been filed will be held in abeyance and the future conduct of each bank carefully scanned Very truly yours, J. R. WATERS, State Examiner, LA ey