My point is they are not "abandoned" because they are played out, but were closed due to environmental laws and politics.
Estimated 1/2 million tons of coal at john henry coal mine is not a 'negligible' amount by any metric.
The resources exist, whether they are worth the effort in comparison to solely exploiting Antiverse resources remains to be seen.
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Diversification of revenue is never a bad thing and they aren't to my knowledge mutually exclusive.
What would be using the coal for, though? I know there are petrochemical uses for bitumen, but this is anthracite, if it's on the spot I'm thinking of. I mean, I guess it's carbon? We could make graphite out of it. Which has uses. But we can get carbon from tons of other, cheaper sources. Ones that don't require us to stick a ton of expensive gear out on a thin branch, and then hope a storm (read: Kaiju) doesn't hit and break the branch.
....Why do we care about coal when we can reliably create fusion power plants?
Like, for city-wide power we just build an over-sized fusion reactor with 10 layers/types of safety measures, so that no matter what worst case the reactor scrams quietly.
Clean power, cheap fuel.
Our vehicles either run on gas, or more likely some sort of hyper-advanced renewable biofuel that has a small fraction of the pollution profile.
Uh...I don't know how much you understand about fusion, but getting fusion to end quietly is actually kinda hard. Harder than it is for fission, anyway. Breaches seem pretty easy to end relatively quietly, though.
I *named* two within 30 miles of Seattle that although abandoned/untapped are both viable. If you like I can research and draw up other SPECIFIC examples. I understand a lot of my supplemental info was editted in and may not have been seen by you. Please take the time to review these before you hand wave it as not worth it. To my ears Its beginning to play out as "My mind is made up, don't try to confuse me with facts..." if that is my mistaken impression I apologize.
You named one I already knew about (the coal), and what's basically a panning stream, which doesn't show up on maps of mineral resources, because it's not a mine, nor is the actual source of the gold likely to be anywhere near the point you mentioned. Because that's how such locations work.
When I made my assessment, I was operating off the assumption we wanted to be dealing with actual metal deposits, and not the results of a river flowing through metal-rich areas. I'm skeptical that a creek has a fast enough flow rate to produce enough metals to support a long-term operation. That proposal sounds like a short-term cash-grab, mostly based on the monetary, rather than practical, value of the gold. Give me some numbers, and I may change my mind, but such operations have historically been small-scale, from what I know.
Thirty miles out is a bad distance, too. Too far for good, close support, too short to be a separate settlement. I'd rather not have a situation like the one here at Outpost MICHEAL, albeit most likely smaller scale, on our hands.
Iron ore + coal = equals steel , maybe?
Depends. Anthracite would probably be better for that than bitumen, but steel isn't usually used on it's these days. It's usually used with added chromium or aluminum. So steel may not be our sticking point. And we may be using more advanced materials, anyway. Still, that does up the value of a coal mine, yes.
