Oren Atkins Jr, who once ran Ashland Oil,
has discovered that one of his metallurgical coal mines out in the Western USA has a huge deposit of rare earth minerals along with its $185 per ton coal.

During the “Carboniferous Geologic Age” volcanoes were spewing out unusual ash.
I have been wondering about that since 1975.

Almost all of my original thoughts about that have been proven wrong headed.

Can you believe that the land we call North America was down in the Pacific Ocean,
East of where Ecuador is now,
and tilted so that a line from New Brunswick Canada through Baja California ran along the Equator of the Earth?

Winds today blow generally West to East across the USA,
but back then winds blew generally East to West?

Molds that today commonly consume dead plants did not yet exist back then,
so that tree leaves and wood that died would fall to wet swampy ground but not ever rot - creating vast beds of coal ?

But “ice ages” would come and go, putting beds of other rock types between the coal seams?

Dragonflys were so big they had 4 foot wingspans?

The earth would mysteriously crack and vast rivers of Lava would flow out in flat sheets for thousands of years - never creating high Volcanic like cones we are used to associating with Lava today?

These flowing lava beds would set both coal seams and forests afire - burning more “fossil fuels” naturally back then
than man has burned in the last 200 years - or in the last 4000 years if you count the recently discovered the human made coal mine in China from 3600 years ago.