http://www.galleries.com/rocks/coal.htmExcerpt:
lignite "...or brown coal is the least mature of the true coals and the most impure. It provides the least yield of energy of the true coals and burns the dirtiest. It is often crumbly, relatively moist and powdery..."
On the other hand, I wouldn't bet the estimate includes this announcement, from a subsidiary of the World Bank, and Newmont Mining. It was only released three days ago:
http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/significant-gold-results-from-lydians/n20080215103209990013"TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 02/15/08 -- Lydian International Ltd. (TSX: LYD), a diversified U.K. mineral exploration and development company, today announced positive results from soil and trench sampling from its Rahovec project in Kosovo. The initial soil sampling program indicated a 1.5km long GOLD anomaly, ...{EMPHASIS ADDED}
"This is an exciting new gold discovery in an area that was previously known only for its Ni-Co-Cu-(PGE) potential," said Tim Coughlin, President and CEO. "The soil geochemistry has defined a large and drill-ready target area."
Lydian has commenced preparations for a scout diamond drilling in the area to test the down dip extent of the gold mineralisation. Further soil sampling and trenching are planned to define the extent of the gold anomaly to the north. This drilling is expected to commence in the next 3-4 weeks.
The Rahovec project is located in Eastern Kosovo, Lydian was granted an 85km2 exploration license in Dec 2006. Rahovec is underlain mainly by ultramafic units which extend southwards into Albania. The project is known to contain sulphide Ni-Co-Cu mineralisation, which is thought to be the result of magmatic differentiation, similar to deposits seen in Western Australia and Northern Canada...
...Lydian's two largest shareholders are Newmont Mineral Holdings B.V., and International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank Group). Lydian's web site is www.lydianresources.com where more information can be found..."Oddly enough, it took me all of four seconds to find this link.
All I had to do was type in GOLD + KOSOVO.
By coincidence, serendipity, and/or virtue of a long memory,
I remember reading about an annoucement of a big, big gold strike, in what was then Yugoslavia, at the very end of 1988, or the beginning of 1989. Not quite 20 years ago. I remember where I was at the time -- an office in Minneapolis -- but not the month. I have friends and family from that part of Europe, but I'd also been spending quite a bit of time with a segment of the comp. lit./foreign language/math-science T.A. crew, at the U. of M., for a few years, most all of whom were ESL posse. (English as a Second Language.)
Anyway, not long after that -- coincidence or not -- the political rivalries, already bad enough, spun out of control, in that part of the world.
I used to think all of that ethnic fractionalism was mainly due to what I used to think of as the "Al Capone effect."
After Tito, the boss of all the neighborhood/ethnic capo's, had passed on to his eternal reward, the individual capo's -- in their own bids to retain and expand their turf -- had exploited resentments and ethnic rivalries long supressed. (The genocides and the extreme, fratricidal, neo-fascist/local-Red rivalries that had been playing out as a backdrop to the Allied-Nazi struggle, in the second world war. The sudden arrival of 30 Red Army divisions brought all that to an immediate stop, in 1945. In neighboring Greece, that fighting wasn't over until the late 1940's.)
Anyway, with the Wall down, the USSR on its own way to a breakup (that also took place in 1991), what had been a working federal system suddenly turned into a weak confederation. The feudal former vassals were all competing for power, using the power of their locally controlled press and media to inflame inter-ethnic tension. With "turf wars" breaking out all over the place, Germany granted recognition to the breakaway Croatian and Slovenian capo's, others followed that lead and all hell broke out in the territorial ethnic patchwork that was Bosnia.
In the ensuing years, the "intervention" of the international community, the curious failure of the Vance/Owen ceasefire... all of it was about as effective in stopping the fighting as the work of Canadian General Roméo Dallaire's troops, the precision canine snipers of the Rwandan cauchemar.
...It is soooo odd that just before the final shoe dropped, yesterday, this announcement comes out...
"...drilling is expected to commence in the next 3-4 weeks. Somehow, I have a feeling that when I go to this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMBO_pipelinethe future of the 750,000 barrel per day, 1.5 billion dollar oil pipeline through Bulgaria, FYROM, and Albania will also turn out to have been recently secured.
Yes. Wiki says,
"...This document has been ratified by the Parliaments of all three countries and will govern the construction, operation, and maintenance of the project. It goes into effect in September 2007. Environmental studies are being conducted and construction licenses need to be obtained, allowing work to commence late 2008."
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