It’s boom times in Wyoming for embattled U.S. coal companies, where the mining industry is hiring workers while shedding them in Appalachia.
Alpha Natural Resources Inc. (ANR), the second-largest U.S. producer, hasn’t posted a profit in three years and is closing money-losing mines in West Virginia amid plans to increase production out West by as much as 30 percent.
Miner Steven King is going along for the ride. After losing his job last month at the company’s Black Castle operation, King, 42, is getting ready to move his family 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) to a state he’s never visited to work at an Alpha site in Wyoming.
With the U.S. coal industry in its worst decline in decades, companies including Alpha and Peabody Energy Corp. (BTU), the biggest producer, are pivoting toward pockets of future profit. No prospect is bigger than the Powder River Basin, a high, mineral-rich plain of yellow grass and sagebrush stretching from central Wyoming to southern Montana.
“It’s going to be running a good while in Wyoming, because of how much coal they put out,” said King, who expects to start work by next month. While he doesn’t know what he’ll be earning, a friend made the move a year ago and since then his base pay has increased to about $35 an hour from $25.
Coal output in the Powder River Basin increased 2.6 percent in the first half from a year earlier while total U.S. production inched upward a mere 0.75 percent. Mines there are vast open holes that cost less than half to operate than those in West Virginia where workers head underground to extract the fuel.
Biggest Mine
Peabody’s North Antelope Rochelle mine in Wyoming is the country’s biggest, with five pits that span 100 square miles (259 square kilometers).
The St. Louis-based company sold 123.3 million tons of Western U.S. coal in the first three quarters, the vast majority from the Powder River Basin. That’s up 4.6 percent from a year earlier and Scott Durgin, senior vice president of operations for the region, said Peabody would have increased output even more if there were enough trains available to haul it away.
Looking at one of the North Antelope pits, he points to a coal seam that’s 60 feet (18 meters) high, and runs north for more than 50 miles. “I don’t see the end of it,” he said. “It just continues to grow.”
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