Robert Murray is pumped — as though coal-fired steam might be coursing through his veins. Striding purposefully, he ascends a lectern in a conference room at Pittsburgh’s Wyndham Grand Downtown hotel toting a cardboard box with hundreds of copies of his keynote speech to give out later lest anyone miss a word.
It turns out to be a corporate version of a hellfire-and-damnation sermon for the 250 U.S. coal executives assembled at the Platts Coal Marketing Days conference. Satan and his minions aren’t in the room but Murray knows their names.
“Environmental alarmists” and “liberal elitists,” he says, his voice rising as he whips off his glasses. And worse than them all, “the insane, regal administration of King Obama” and Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency.
Murray, 74, pauses for effect and then lowers his voice. “We have the absolute destruction of the United States coal industry. It isn’t coming back. It’s permanent. Virtually all of it is permanent. And if you think it’s coming back, you don’t understand the business. Or you’re smoking dope.”
This is vintage Murray, America’s pro-coal provocateur-in-chief, a coal miner’s son and a former miner himself, a man whose anti-regulation record is so unwavering that he once dismissed acid rain as a hoax, never mind climate change.
His warnings are all the more interesting when framed against what Murray, chief executive officer and owner of Murray Energy Corp., is actually doing. For all the doom and gloom, he is gorging on coal mines — Murray Energy last fall spent $3.5 billion to acquire five of Consol Energy Inc.’s West Virginia operations.
Brimstone, Money
It was the biggest deal in the beleaguered coal sector in two-and-a-half years, catapulting his St. Clairsville, Ohio-based company into the country’s fifth-largest coal producer and making Murray Energy America’s largest privately held coal producer. Ever since, Murray’s been on a tear, ramping up production at his newly acquired mines as he ratchets up his rhetoric in defense of his beleaguered industry and against Obama’s “War on Coal.”
Yet if war is hell, Murray seems to smell something else in the air besides brimstone: Money. Make no mistake about it, Bob Murray has a plan. Statistics indicate that it’s been a terrible decade for coal. The market capitalization of the entire industry has shrunk from $78 billion in 2011 to about $25 billion today. Coal now generates 37 percent of the country’s electricity -– down from over 50 percent in 2007.
Still, 37 percent represents at least a $30 billion a year industry and even as that pie shrinks, huge profits will accrue to those who stay the course. Even globally, coal’s lot is always more complicated than the dire prophesies of both its detractors and advocates. Consider that Germany — with the world’s most ambitious green-energy program — has gone back to burning copious amounts of dirty lignite to make up for the shortfall in electricity being caused by its phase-out of its nuclear power plants.
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