Gorgas, Alabama | |
|---|---|
  Gorgas  Gorgas | |
| Coordinates: 33°38′57″N87°12′29″W / 33.64917°N 87.20806°W | |
| Country | United States |
| State | Alabama |
| County | Tuscaloosa, Walker |
| Elevation | 495 ft (151 m) |
| Time zone | UTC-6 (Central (CST)) |
| • Summer (DST) | UTC-5 (CDT) |
| Area code(s) | 205, 659 |
| GNIS feature ID | 119178 [1] |
Gorgas is a settlement in Walker and Tuscaloosa counties, Alabama, United States. It is named, via a former school in the area, after William Crawford Gorgas. [2]
Gorgas is located in northern Tuscaloosa [2] and Walker counties. [3] The boundaries of Gorgas were determined by the catchment area of the Gorgas High School. [4]
Originally the settlement had been known simply as "Camp Ground" after the local Bethel Camp Ground Methodist Church. A high school was created in the area named after William Crawford Gorgas c. 1916, and the settlement became known by the same name. [4] The school closed in 1973. [2]
In 1940 a study of the area commissioned by the Tennessee Valley Authority called They Live on The Land was published by sociologists Paul Terry and Verner Sims of the University of Alabama, though Gorgas was renamed the fictional moniker "Upland Bend" in their study. At the time of their study Gorgas consisted of 209 families, of whom 196 households were interviewed, [5] 30 black and 166 white. [6]
A post office operated under the name Gorgas from 1918 to 1971. [7]
Beginning from 1917, Gorgas was home to a steam plant for producing energy. [8] The steam plant was owned by the Alabama Power Company. [9] During the 1920s, the steam plant was the subject of a dispute between Alabama Power and Henry Ford, who sought control of a stake in the plant in order to power his development at Muscle Shoals, which Ford ultimately lost. [10] [11] The final Gorgas Coal-powered plant, located in Walker county, finally shut in 2019, more than a 100 years after the first coal-fired plant opened there. At the time of closing, it was Alabama's oldest coal-fired plant. [12]
Beginning in 1947, coal mines in the area, in Walker county, also owned by Alabama Power were the site of the first experiment in in-situ coal gasification in the United States, first using thermite as the ignition source, [13] [14] and then using electricity. [9] The experiments were carried out in a partnership between Alabama Power and the US Bureau of Mines. The experiments continued for seven years until 1953, at which point the US Bureau of Mines withdrew its support for them after the US Congress withdrew funding. In total 6,000 tons of coal were combusted during up to 1953. The experiments succeeded in producing combustible synthetic gas. [15] The experiments were reactivated after 1954, this time with hydrofracturing using a mixture of oil and sand, but finally discontinued in 1958 as uneconomical. [16] The mines continued operation until the 1970s. [17]
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal is a type of fossil fuel, formed when dead plant matter decays into peat and is converted into coal by the heat and pressure of deep burial over millions of years. Vast deposits of coal originate in former wetlands called coal forests that covered much of the Earth's tropical land areas during the late Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian) and Permian times.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned electric utility corporation in the United States. TVA's service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. While owned by the federal government, TVA receives no taxpayer funding and operates similarly to a private for-profit company. It is headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, and is the sixth-largest power supplier and largest public utility in the country.
Walker County is a county located in the central portion of the U.S. state of Alabama. As of the 2020 census, the population was 65,342. Its county seat is Jasper. Its name is in honor of John Williams Walker, the first U.S. senator elected from Alabama.
Muscle Shoals is the largest city in Colbert County, Alabama, United States. It is located on the left bank of the Tennessee River in the northern part of the state and, as of the 2010 census, its population was 13,146. The estimated population in 2019 was 14,575.
William Crawford Gorgas KCMG was a United States Army physician and 22nd Surgeon General of the U.S. Army (1914–1918). He is best known for his work in Florida, Havana and at the Panama Canal in abating the transmission of yellow fever and malaria by controlling the mosquitoes that carry these diseases, for which he used the discoverments made by the cuban doctor Carlos J. Finlay. At first, Finlay's strategy was greeted with considerable skepticism and opposition to such hygiene measures. However, the measures Gorgas put into practice as the head of the Panama Canal Zone Sanitation Commission saved thousands of lives and contributed to the success of the Canal's construction.
The Birmingham District is a geological area in the vicinity of Birmingham, Alabama, where the raw materials for making steel, limestone, iron ore, and coal are found together in abundance. The district includes Red Mountain, Jones Valley, and the Warrior and Cahaba coal fields in Central Alabama.
Underground coal gasification (UCG) is an industrial process which converts coal into product gas. UCG is an in-situ gasification process, carried out in non-mined coal seams using injection of oxidants and steam. The product gas is brought to the surface through production wells drilled from the surface.
An integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) is a technology using a high pressure gasifier to turn coal and other carbon based fuels into pressurized gas—synthesis gas (syngas). It can then remove impurities from the syngas prior to the electricity generation cycle. Some of these pollutants, such as sulfur, can be turned into re-usable byproducts through the Claus process. This results in lower emissions of sulfur dioxide, particulates, mercury, and in some cases carbon dioxide. With additional process equipment, a water-gas shift reaction can increase gasification efficiency and reduce carbon monoxide emissions by converting it to carbon dioxide. The resulting carbon dioxide from the shift reaction can be separated, compressed, and stored through sequestration. Excess heat from the primary combustion and syngas fired generation is then passed to a steam cycle, similar to a combined cycle gas turbine. This process results in improved thermodynamic efficiency, compared to conventional pulverized coal combustion.
Wilson Dam is a dam on the Tennessee River between Lauderdale and Colbert counties in Alabama. Completed in 1924 by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, it impounds Wilson Lake, and is one of nine Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) dams on the Tennessee River. It was declared a National Historic Landmark on November 13, 1966, for its role as the first dam to come under the TVA's administration. The dam is named for Woodrow Wilson.
The Tannehill Ironworks is the central feature of Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park near the unincorporated town of McCalla in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Tannehill Furnace, it was a major supplier of iron for Confederate ordnance. Remains of the old furnaces are located 12 miles (19 km) south of Bessemer off Interstate 59/Interstate 20 near the southern end of the Appalachian Mountains. The 2,063-acre (835 ha) park includes: the John Wesley Hall Grist Mill; the May Plantation Cotton Gin House; and the Iron & Steel Museum of Alabama.
Majuba Power Station between Volksrust and Amersfoort in Mpumalanga, South Africa, is a coal-fired power plant operated by Eskom. Majuba is Eskom's only power station that is not linked to a specific mine and it receives its coal from various sources. This was due to an error in geotechnical engineering core drilling which did not identify that the proposed local coal mine was under solid bedrock.
The Gorgas–Manly Historic District is a historic district that includes 12 acres (4.9 ha) and eight buildings on the campus of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The buildings represent the university campus as it existed from the establishment of the institution through to the late 19th century. Two buildings included in the district, Gorgas House and the Little Round House, are among only seven structures to have survived the burning of the campus by the Union Army, under the command of Brigadier General John T. Croxton, on April 4, 1865. The other survivors were the President's Mansion and the Old Observatory, plus a few faculty residences.
The Kemper Project, also called the Kemper County energy facility or Plant Ratcliffe, is a natural gas-fired electrical generating station currently under construction in Kemper County, Mississippi. Mississippi Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company, began construction of the plant in 2010. The initial, coal-fired project was central to President Obama's Climate Plan, as it was to be based on "clean coal" and was being considered for more support from the Congress and the incoming Trump Administration in late 2016. If it had become operational with coal, the Kemper Project would have been a first-of-its-kind electricity plant to employ gasification and carbon capture technologies at this scale.
Coal gasification is a process whereby a hydrocarbon feedstock (coal) is converted into gaseous components by applying heat under pressure in the presence of steam. Rather than burning, most of the carbon-containing feedstock is broken apart by chemical reactions that produce "syngas." Syngas is primarily hydrogen and carbon monoxide, but the exact composition can vary. In Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) systems, the syngas is cleaned and burned as fuel in a combustion turbine which then drives an electric generator. Exhaust heat from the combustion turbine is recovered and used to create steam for a steam turbine-generator. The use of these two types of turbines in combination is one reason why gasification-based power systems can achieve high power generation efficiencies. Currently, commercially available gasification-based systems can operate at around 40% efficiencies. Syngas, however, emits more greenhouse gases than natural gas, and almost twice as much carbon as a coal plant. Coal gasification is also water-intensive.
Coal Valley, also known as Cormick, is an unincorporated community in Walker County, Alabama, United States.
McCullough is an unincorporated community in Escambia County, Alabama, United States.
Milton Henry Fies was a Jewish-American engineer, miner, chemist, and town founder from Birmingham, Alabama.
They Live on the Land: Life in an Open Country Southern Community is a social study of an Alabama rural community written by social scientists Paul W. Terry and Verner M. Sims and published in 1940. The book was based on research undertaken by Terry and Sims under the auspices of the Tennessee Valley Authority during the period 1934–1936. Terry and Sims were academic researchers in educational psychology based at the University of Alabama at the time.
The Colbert Combustion Turbine Plant is a combustion turbine natural gas-fired power plant operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) near Tuscumbia, Alabama. Commissioned in 1972, it is currently the oldest gas-fired power plant operated by TVA. The site was formerly home to the Colbert Fossil Plant, a coal-fired power station which operated from 1955 to 2016.
Municipalities and communities of Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, United States | ||
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| Cities |  | |
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| Other unincorporated communities | ||
| Ghost town | ||
| Footnotes | ‡This populated place also has portions in an adjacent county or counties | |
Municipalities and communities of Walker County, Alabama, United States | ||
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| Cities |  | |
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| Unincorporated communities | ||
| Footnotes | ‡This populated place also has portions in an adjacent county or counties | |