Anthracite Geologically, the largest most concentrated anthracite deposit in the world is found in the Lackawanna Coal Mine in northeastern Pennsylvania, United States in and around Scranton, Pennsylvania. Locally called the Coal Region, the deposit contains 480 square miles of coal bearing rock which originally held 22.8 billion short tons (20.68 billion tonnes) of anthracite. (The geographic region is roughly 100 miles (161 km) in length and 30 miles (48 km) in width.) Because of historical mining and development of the lands overlying the coal, it is estimated that 7 billion short tons (6.3 billion tonnes) of minable reserves remain. The
Anthracite times been futile, and several such combustion areas exist today. The existence of an underground combustion site can sometimes be identified in the winter where fallen snow is seen to be melted by the warmth conducted from below. Proposals for harnessing this heat as geothermal energy have not been successful. A vein of anthracite that caught fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania in 1962 has been burning ever since, turning the once-thriving borough into a ghost town. Among current producers, Russia, China and Ukraine have the largest estimated recoverable reserves of anthracite. Other countries with substantial reserves include Vietnam and North Korea.