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Swiss coal miner Glencore warns NSW against ‘revenue grab’ – by Elouise Fowler (Australian Financial Review – August 2, 2023)

https://www.afr.com/

Glencore, one of the largest coal miners in NSW, is urging the state not to hike coal mining levies in a “revenue grab”, as the Minns government mulls following Queensland’s lead on higher coal royalties. The NSW government signalled a shake-up of coal royalty payments last week amid a broader consultation with the market on how to dent electricity prices after the coal price cap expires mid-next year.

The Switzerland-based miner and commodity trader, which reported 2022 full-year profits of $US34 billion ($51 billion) driven by soaring coal prices, warned the NSW government against changes to the royalty scheme.

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Deep Inside Mountains, Work Is Getting Much More Dangerous – by Drew A. Harris (New York Times – August 2, 2023)

https://www.nytimes.com/

Drew Harris is the medical director of Stone Mountain Health Services black lung program and an associate professor of pulmonary and critical-care medicine at the University of Virginia.

As a high school baseball star, Denver Hoskins led Kentucky in home runs and was invited to try out for the Cincinnati Reds. But when his father got sick (and later died) from black lung, a disease caused by inhaling mineral dust, the younger Mr. Hoskins gave up his Division I college scholarship offer to support his family.

Following in his father’s footsteps, he went to work as a coal miner. By the age of 44, Mr. Hoskins was diagnosed with his own case of the most severe form of black lung. He now breathes from an oxygen tank at night and watches his son’s batting practice from the sidelines.

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[History] Women in Welsh Coal Mining – by Norena Shopland (Nation Cymru – July 31, 2023)

https://nation.cymru/

When 19-year-old Ann Bowcot from Dowlais was interviewed for the 1842 Children’s Employment report, she told the investigators that when she started work at the mines she was so small she had to be carried on her father’s shoulders to work.

She was not alone. It was common to see men carrying small children in the dark hours before dawn to the mine, where they would descend and remain most of the day. Society was appalled, and demanded something be done. The 1833 Factory Act had restricted the employment of children but why, people were asking, had this Act not been applied to other industries such as mining – so the government ordered an investigation.

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Teck lowers outlook at biggest copper project as it eyes shift away from coal Naimul Karim (Financial Post – July 27, 2023)

https://financialpost.com/

Profit slumps on lower commodity prices

Teck Resources Ltd. lowered its annual production guidance for copper this year due to delays in construction and commissioning at its most significant copper property, the Quebrada Blanca 2 (QB2) project in Chile.

The Vancouver-based company now expects to produce about 80,000 to 100,000 tonnes of copper from QB2 as opposed to the previously announced 150,000 to 180,000 tonnes. As a result, its overall guidance for copper has been cut to 330,000 to 375,000 tonnes from 390,000 to 445,000 tonnes.

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‘King Coal’ First Look: Visually Stunning Documentary Captures Mythic Power Of Appalachian Coal Country – by Matthew Carey (Deadline.com – July 21, 2023)

 

https://deadline.com/

EXCLUSIVE: Only about 40,000 people work in coal mining in the U.S., a modest number compared to other lines of work – 1.7 million people, for instance, are employed in the auto industry.

And yet coal and coal mining occupy an almost mythic place in the American imagination that belies the labor force statistics. In the documentary King Coal, Oscar-nominated filmmaker and Appalachia native Elaine McMillion Sheldon examines a part of the country deeply embedded, one might say, in the charred rock. As America increasingly turns away from coal as an energy source and towards renewables, the future of coal country remains uncertain.

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[Coal Mining History] Opinion: The Redneck Army Refuses to Stay Buried – by Cassady Rosenblum (New York Times – July 21, 2023)

https://www.nytimes.com/

The striking miners were 10,000 strong on the first day of September 1921 as they charged up the slope of Blair Mountain, propelled by a radical faith in the American dream. According to an Associated Press reporter who crouched behind a log and watched through field glasses, each time they pressed forward, a “veritable wall” of machine gun fire drove them back.

As the barrage peeled through the hollows, reminding some of the action they had just seen in the forests of France, the advancing miners soon heard a different sound: deeper, earthshaking explosions. From biplanes above, tear gas, explosive powder and metal bolts rained down. “My God,” screamed one miner fighting his way up Crooked Creek Gap. “They’re bombing us!”

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Why Heat Waves Are Deepening China’s Addiction to Coal – by Keith Bradsher (New York Times – July 20, 2023)

https://www.nytimes.com/

While pledging to reduce carbon emissions, the country is greatly increasing its use of the fossil fuel to generate electricity.

China has an answer to the heat waves now affecting much of the Northern Hemisphere: burn more coal to maintain a stable electricity supply for air-conditioning.

Even before this year, China was emitting almost a third of all energy-related greenhouse gases — more than the United States, Europe and Japan combined. China burns more coal every year than the rest of the world combined. Last month, China generated 14 percent more electricity from coal, its dominant fuel source, than it did in June 2022.

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Inside The Molly Maguires, The Secret Society That Fought Bloody Battles For Workers’ Rights In The 1800s – by Genevieve Carlton (All Thats Interesting – July 19, 2020)

https://allthatsinteresting.com/

When mine owners cut wages in 1870s Pennsylvania, the Molly Maguires fought back. But with a private military on their side, the mine owners ultimately won what would become the first labor war in U.S. history.

In the 1870s, the Molly Maguires assassinated 24 mine foremen and supervisors and sent “coffin notices” to scabs during mining strikes. The secret society carried out assaults, arsons, and murders for years before a Pinkerton detective infiltrated the organization to bring them down from the inside.

The Molly Maguires fought for better working conditions in the deadly mines of Pennsylvania. But their violent methods caught up with them in a trial that sent twenty men to the gallows. Were the Molly Maguires vicious murderers or desperate workers fighting for their rights?

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Coal built Grande Cache, Alta. But plans for a new mine don’t sit well with some residents – by Erin Collins (CBC News Canada – July 16, 2023)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/

Summit 14 mine project promises new jobs and taxes. But some fear water contamination, climate impacts

The long black streaks in the hills along Highway 40 outside Grande Cache, Alta., are a clear sign of the rich coal seams that run through the eastern slopes of the Rockies there.

The community, about 430 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, was established in the 1960s to serve the mine that still pulls coal out of the ground outside town. The volatile coal industry has fuelled the local economy from the beginning.

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‘Like hell’: India’s burning coalfields (France24.com -July 14, 2023)

https://www.france24.com/en/

Dhanbad (India) (AFP) – Deadly fires have raged for a century in mines in India’s Jharkhand state, where Savitri Mahto is one of 100,000 people risking their lives shovelling coal to supply insatiable demand.

“The land is charred because of the fires,” said Mahto, 22, illegally scavenging amid the flames on the edge of a vast commercial opencast mine for the dirty fossil fuel. “We live in fear every day”. Underground fires, which scientists believe started in a mine accident in 1916, create sinkholes that swallow people and homes. Coal pickers and activists report hundreds of people have died over the decades.

“Accidents have happened before, and they keep on happening because the land is sinking,” Mahto told AFP, as she tended a stack of burning rocks to produce coking coal, a more stable fuel sold for cooking and firing brick kilns.

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Tracing Mining’s Threat to U.S. Waters – by Jim Robbins (New York Times – July 11, 2023)

https://www.nytimes.com/

Environmental concerns are raised anew about potential contamination from Canadian open-pit mines flowing through the waterways into Montana’s lakes, harming fish.

PABLO, Mont. — In the mountain streams of southern British Columbia and northern Montana, a rugged part of the world, fish with misshapen skulls and twisted spines have been caught over the years.

Many scientists attribute the malformed creatures and declines in certain fish populations to five enormous open-pit coal mines that interrupt this wild landscape of dense forest flush with grizzly bears and wolves.

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When coal was king in the Welsh valleys of the Rhondda – by Dana Huntley (British Heritage Travel – June 15, 2023)

https://britishheritage.com/

The scars left behind by the collieries of Wales’ Rhondda Valley are beginning to heal, but some things never change.

Scarcely an hour’s drive west of the pristine villages, prosperous cottage gardens, and sylvan landscapes of the Cotswolds lies the southern Welsh county of mid-Glamorgan. Throngs of touring coaches, camera-wielding photojournalists, and well-heeled tourists don’t come here. These are the valleys of the Rhondda.

In the Valleys

Fanning out above the Welsh capital of Cardiff, these valleys are the coalfields of South Wales, narrow glens snaking their way south to north, from the Bristol Channel coast toward the Brecon Beacons. Every few miles up and down the hills lie the skeletal remains of a pit head, rusting silently, majestic.

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Coal miners would be protected from black lung disease under proposed silica rule – by Robert Benincasa (Georgia Public Broadcasting – July 5, 2023)

https://www.gpb.org/

The Labor Department is proposing a new rule limiting miners’ exposure to silica — a toxic dust created by cutting into rock that has been linked to a recent epidemic of severe black lung disease among coal miners.

“The purpose of this proposed rule is simple: prevent more miners from suffering from debilitating and deadly occupational illnesses by reducing their exposure to silica dust,” Assistant Secretary for Mine Safety and Health Chris Williamson said in a statement. The move comes after decades of regulatory inaction highlighted in an NPR/FRONTLINE investigation in 2018.

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Indonesia’s coal burning hits record high — and ‘green’ nickel is largely why – by Hans Nicholas Jong (Mongabay.com – July 3, 2023)

https://news.mongabay.com/

JAKARTA — Indonesia burned more coal in 2022 than any other year, a preliminary analysis shows, putting the country on track to become one of the largest carbon emitters from fossil fuel in the world.

Data from the Indonesian Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources showed that coal consumption amounted to 745.72 million barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) in 2022, a 33% increase from 558.78 million BOE in 2021. The data shows the country’s coal consumption to be the highest ever by a very large margin.

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Column: Europe’s clashes over coal may extend well beyond Poland – by Gavin Maguire (Reuters – June 20, 2023)

https://www.reuters.com/

LITTLETON, Colorado, June 20 (Reuters) – European Union members clashed over proposals to extend subsidies for coal plants this week and could not agree on planned new rules for the bloc’s power market, which has been in disarray since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year.

The disagreements centered around prolonging subsidies for coal plants to keep capacity on standby to avert blackouts, with Poland cited as a key regional power producer that may be negatively affected if the subsidies were scrapped.

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