Coal – Page 86 – Republic of Mining

America’s Most Notorious Coal Baron Is Going to Prison. But He Still Haunts West Virginia Politics. – by By Tim Murphy (Mother Jones Magazine – April 19, 2016)

April 29, 2016

http://www.motherjones.com/

Don Blankenship is looming large over the contentious governor’s race.

As CEO of Massey Energy, central Appalachia’s largest coal producer, Don Blankenship towered over West Virginia politics for more than a decade by spending millions to bolster Republican candidates and causes.

That chapter came to an end in April, when Blankenship was sentenced to a year in prison for conspiring to commit mine safety violations in the period leading up to the deadly 2010 explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine. But even in absentia, he casts a long shadow over state politics. For evidence, look no further than the contentious Democratic primary for governor.

The campaign pits Jim Justice, a billionaire coal operator and high school basketball coach, against two opponents—state Senate Minority Leader Jeff Kessler, and Booth Goodwin, the former US attorney who prosecuted Blankenship.

Adani Australian coal mine approval faces fresh court challenge – by (Reuters India – April 27, 2016)

April 27, 2016

http://in.reuters.com/

A green group has asked the Supreme Court of Queensland to review the environmental approval granted to Indian conglomerate Adani Enterprise Ltd to build one of the world’s biggest coal mines in the Australian state.

Adani, which was granted a mining lease by Queensland earlier this month, has battled opposition from green groups since starting work on the coal project six years ago. Environmentalists continue to fight it on numerous fronts and are lobbying banks not to provide loans.

In the latest challenge to the $10-billion Carmichael mine, rail and port project, conservation group Coast and Country said Queensland had failed to consider “ecologically sustainable development”, an overall environmental safety net, as required.

Teck Resources Posts Surprise Adjusted Profit as Costs Fall – by Danielle Bochove and Liezel Hill (Bloomberg News – April 26, 2016)

April 26, 2016

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Teck Resources Ltd. reported first-quarter results that beat analysts’ estimates as Canada’s largest diversified miner cut costs to offset the impact of lower commodity prices.

Profit attributable to shareholders was C$94 million ($74 million) compared with C$68 million a year earlier, the Vancouver-based company said Tuesday in a statement. Excluding one-time items, Teck posted earnings of 3 Canadian cents a share, beating the 3-cent loss estimated by 19 analysts tracked by Bloomberg.

Steelmaking coal unit costs, including transportation charges, fell 9.4 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, to C$77 a metric ton, while copper cash-unit costs after by-product credits declined 16 percent to $1.29 per pound. “Our operations performed well by reducing our costs while maintaining production volumes,” Chief Executive Officer Don Lindsay said in the statement.

Men of the Deeps director wins Helen Creighton Lifetime Achievement Award – by By Hal Higgins (CBC News Nova Scotia – April 19, 2016)

April 21, 2016

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/

Jack O’Donnell took group on as a one-time project, still with them 50 years later

As a recipient of the Dr. Helen Creighton Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2016 ECMA gala concert in Sydney last weekend, Jack O’Donnell is reflecting on a connection with the legendary folklorist that began in 1966.

“It was 50 years ago this month,” he said, recalling how Creighton encouraged him when he was a professor in the music department at St. Francis Xavier University to collect coal mining songs from Cape Breton. Moreover, she wanted him to become the director of a singing group composed of miners and former miners.

The singing group was the brainchild of Nina Cohen of Glace Bay. She had proposed the formation of such a chorus, which would showcase Cape Breton’s mining history at Expo ’67 in Montreal during Canada’s centennial year.

Coal’s demise threatens Appalachian miners, firms as production moves West – by Nathan Bomey (USA Today – April 20, 2016)

April 20, 2016

http://www.usatoday.com/

The crushing forces prevailing against the U.S. coal industry have triggered an unprecedented shakeout, sparking bankruptcies of the industry’s biggest players — such as last week’s collapse of Peabody Energy — and battering jobs in Appalachia even as mines in the west weather the fallout.

Peabody, the nation’s largest coal company, slid into Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, just five years after its market value reached a high of $20 billion, as the oil and natural gas shale boom shifts the seat of power to miners in states such as Montana and Wyoming, where extracting coal is cheaper.

Peabody’s bankruptcy filing follows at least 50 in the industry over the last few years including Arch Coal in January and last year’s filings of Patriot Coal, Alpha Natural Resources and Walter Energy.

UPDATE 2-BHP Billiton weighs getting out of Indonesian coal – by Sonali Paul (Ruters U.S. – April 20, 2016)

April 20, 2016

http://www.reuters.com/

MELBOURNE, April 20 BHP Billiton is considering quitting its coal assets in Indonesia, where it recently started shipping steel-making coal from a small mine, amid uncertainty over Indonesian regulations and a weak outlook for coal.

BHP owns a 75 percent stake in the IndoMet Coal project, having sold the rest to Indonesia’s Adaro Energy in 2010 for $335 million. Coal asset prices have collapsed since then, and analysts said BHP would be lucky to fetch $200 million now for the stake in a largely undeveloped resource.

“Does it move the dial for BHP? No. But it’s a really high quality met-coal property and potentially a fantastic opportunity for an Indonesian company with the right connections,” said Shaw & Partners analyst Peter O’Connor.

Fancy a trip down to the bowels of the earth? Coal India will take you – by Debabrata Das (Hindu Business – April 19, 2016)

April 20, 2016

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/

NEW DELHI – Are you an explorer at heart and crave adventure? Then Coal India Ltd (CIL) has just the right thing for you. This vacation, instead of going to a hill station or hitting the beaches, go for a trip to two active coal mines.

Coal India is offering a peek into its operations by promoting eco-mine tourism at two mines operated by its subsidiary, Western Coalfields Ltd.

In a bid to showcase the minimal environmental impact of coal mining operations, Western Coalfields has created a 15-acre eco-park between Saoner and Gondegaon mines near Maharashtra. Tourists can visit the depths of the Saoner underground mine and also watch the operations at the Gondegaon opencast mine from a distance.

Australia’s Largest Mining Project Moves Forward, Despite Weak Demand for Coal – by Harry Pearl (Vice News – April 18, 2016)

April 19, 2016

https://news.vice.com/

When scientists from Australia’s Coral Bleaching Task Force conducted a series of aerial surveys of the Great Barrier Reef last month, they expected to find some damage from the world’s warming oceans around Lizard Island, north of Cooktown on Queensland’s northeast coast.

Instead they found a disaster of epic proportion. Ninety-five percent of more than 500 reefs stretching between Cairns and Papua New Guinea showed signs of bleaching — and some reefs appeared close to death.

The Great Barrier Reef had seen coral bleaching before, but this was the worst on record. Task force leader Terry Hughes, a professor of marine biology at James Cook University, described the group’s journey as the “saddest research trip of my life.”

Poland feels the pain of its love affair with coal – by Agnieszka Barteczko and Barbara Lewis (Reuters – April 15, 2016)

April 18, 2016

http://www.reuters.com/

WARSAW/BRUSSELS – For generations, the region of Silesia has been at the heart of Poland’s love affair with coal as a source of pride and heroism.

Election to Poland’s top job has depended on maintaining coal’s special national status and Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, a coal miner’s daughter from Silesia, swept to office in October on a promise she would ring-fence the industry’s 100,000 jobs.

It is a pledge she is now under almost as much pressure to break as to keep. The energy ministry has said the nation’s biggest mining firm, headquartered in Silesia, risks running out of cash at the end of the month. It is a familiar cry, and in the past, funds somehow appeared.

Peabody’s Death Throes Threaten Gas – by Liam Denning (Bloomberg News – April 13, 2016)

April 14, 2016

http://www.bloomberg.com/

King coal is dead. But he just might take a swipe at his mortal enemy — natural gas — on the way down.Peabody Energy’s crash into bankruptcy, taking down the largest private-sector coal miner in the world, represents a moment for the industry (or maybe just the latest in a series of moments).

Two of them came last year, when U.S. power plants running on natural gas were used more than coal-fired plants for the first time ever and when Paris happened to host a global conference that was generally down on the whole idea of burning black rocks.

Regulation aimed at curbing coal use has undoubtedly played its part in pushing coal miners over the precipice. Yet the industry has also suffered from a combination of factors that have periodically pulverized commodity companies since before Peabody was founded back in 1883; namely, competition and overreach. A quick look at this chart shows that coal’s experience isn’t quite unique.

How coal titan Peabody, the world’s largest, fell into bankruptcy – by Chris Mooney and Steven Mufson (Washington Post – April 13, 2016)

April 14, 2016

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

In the starkest sign yet of declining fortunes in the coal industry, St. Louis-based Peabody Energy, the largest and most storied U.S. coal company, announced early Wednesday that it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The company cited an “unprecedented industry downturn,” which it attributed to a range of factors including an economic slowdown in China, low coal prices and “overproduction of domestic shale gas.” In the United States, cheap natural gas, driven by the shale-gas boom, has been steadily eating into coal’s share of electricity generation.

But Peabody was also weighed down by debt from its poorly timed $5.2 billion acquisition of Macarthur Coal of Australia in 2011, near the peak for coal prices there as Peabody underestimated rival coal supplies and overestimated the growth of Chinese coal consumption.

The Undoing of a Coal Baron – by the Editorial Board (New York Times – April 7, 2016)

April 12, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/

It was the rarest of news in the coal mining hollows of Appalachia: A once powerful executive, Donald Blankenship, was sentenced Wednesday to a year in prison for conspiring to violate federal mine safety laws at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, where 29 workers died in an explosion six years ago.

The very idea that a dominant baron of the industry called King Coal could be brought to justice and put behind bars shook the region, where miners have long complained that they face dangerous and illegal working conditions that routinely result in no punishment.

Mr. Blankenship, who served as chief executive of the Massey Energy Company, was not accused of causing the explosion, but his management methods, so notoriously focused on profitability, came under investigation after the disaster and led to his federal conviction on a misdemeanor charge in December in a Charleston courthouse.

Decline and fall: the broken dreams of a Chinese coal-mining city struggling to address industrial overcapacity – by Zhou Xin (South China Morning Post – April 12, 2016)

April 12, 2016

http://www.scmp.com/

A grim, uncertain future hangs over the 1.7 million residents of Datong in the heart of China’s dusty, windswept coal-mining country about 350km west of Beijing. Amid the imminent threat of massive lay-offs, the city’s coal workers are battling for back-pay and timely salaries just so they can feed their families.

In another area of the city the local government’s boom-and-bust redevelopment plans lie unfinished. A multimillion-dollar “white elephant” sports stadium is slowly being reclaimed by the dust.

Elsewhere, the ruins of the partially built replica ancient walled city are a monument to the failed plans of the city’s former mayor – nicknamed “Demolition Geng” – who dreamed of remaking an “ancient walled city” in the urban centre, but who is long gone.

Former Massey Energy CEO Sentenced to 12 Months in Prison – by Kris Maher (Wall Street Journal – April 6, 2016)

April 6, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/

Don Blankenship convicted in December of conspiring to violate federal mine safety laws

CHARLESTON, W.Va.—A federal judge sentenced former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship to 12 months in prison, closing another chapter on the deadliest U.S. coal mining accident in more than four decades.

Mr. Blankenship, 66 years old, was convicted in December on one misdemeanor count of conspiring to violate federal mine safety laws, while being acquitted of more serious counts of lying to investors and regulators.

The sentence, which included a $250,000 fine, was handed down by U.S. District Judge Irene C. Berger six years and one day after Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine exploded on April 5, 2010, killing 29 men and leaving a scar across a state that has long relied on coal mining.

Laid off coal miners on their own after fueling Wyo economy for decades – by Dustin Bleizeffer (WyoFile.com – April 5, 2016)

April 6, 2016

http://www.wyofile.com/

GILLETTE — Rumors about the coal industry are common in northeast Wyoming where strip mining provides 5,000 direct jobs and supports about three times that in the mine services sector. But when Arch Coal filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January, Robert Frieze, who works at Arch’s Coal Creek mine, realized that talk of layoffs might be true. Then the number of trains loaded at the company’s Coal Creek mine dropped by half.

Frieze and his partner Megan Fink began preparing. Then came Black Thursday — March 31. Arch laid off 230 workers at its Black Thunder mine. Peabody Energy announced 235 layoffs at its North Antelope Rochelle Mine on the same day. Frieze survived the cut, as the layoffs didn’t include Coal Creek. But he and Megan still have a sick feeling in their gut.

“Right now we’re just scared, because who is to say if he goes to work tonight and has to come home right away?” Fink said Saturday afternoon as Frieze slept to prepare for another night shift.