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Coal country unruffled by strip mining in flourishing Egypt Valley – by Geoff Williams (America AlJazeera – October 26, 2015)

http://america.aljazeera.com/

Despite blow to Ohio wildlife, locals see environmental upside, are more concerned with fracking in their backyards

PIEDMONT, Ohio — The Egypt Valley Wildlife Area is a tribute to what can happen after land is strip-mined of its coal and restored to nature. The area, state-owned land in eastern Ohio, is 18,011 acres of rolling hills, wetlands and grasslands. There is the 2,270-acre Piedmont Lake, popular with boaters and campers, and as one would expect in a wildlife area, there is wildlife. River otters were introduced in 1993, and black bears have made their home there, among the deer and wild turkeys.

For decades, this land was strip-mined for coal. But in the 1990s, Ohio began purchasing the land, transforming it into a magnet for animals, birdwatchers, hikers, hunters, fishermen and tourists.

However, much of the state’s and nature’s hard work is now at risk, ever since July, when the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) granted the Oxford Mining Co. a permit to strip-mine coal there. The company plans to mine underneath 741 acres for coal and to surface-mine 200 acres.

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FOCUS: Poland’s love affair with coal won’t end soon – by Paulina Pacula (Euobservor.com – October 23, 2015)

https://euobserver.com/

Poland’s coal-based energy sector provides a livelihood for hundred of thousands of people in Upper Silesia and has the potential to swing Sunday’s (25 October) national election.

In the small Polish town of Brzeszcze, part of the Upper Silesian coal basin, almost half of the 21,000 inhabitants depend on one employer: the KWK Brzeszcze mine, which is soon to be closed.

More then 2,000 men stand to lose their jobs because, for the last couple of years, the mine has been unprofitable – for every tonne of coal sold, the company had to pay an extra 265 zlotys.

If the mine is closed, unemployment in the municipality will skyrocket from its already-high level of 11.6%.

A similar fate probably awaits another 11,000 workers from unprofitable mines run by the biggest state mining company, Kompania Węglowa and 3,000 from JSW.

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Coal Industry Has Wounded Itself Much Worse Than Obama’s Policies Ever Could – by Ken Silverstein (Forbes Magazine – October 23, 2015)

http://www.forbes.com/

With America’s most notorious coal boss standing trial on conspiracy and securities fraud charges, the industry should be asking itself just who is to blame for its woes. The overlooked irony of this federal case is that the sector should be looking closely at itself, and undergoing a thorough self-evaluation.

The coal industry, however, will continue to blame President Obama and his “radical” Environmental Protection Agency that has sought to ensure a cleaner environment while also using the public levers to advance green energies. What it refuses to acknowledge, though, is its own role — that its own strong-armed tactics have worked to oust it from America’s energy throne. And no individual personifies that trait more than the man on trial: Don Blankenship, former chief executive of Massey Energy.

Prosecutors are still making their case, all before the defense gets a chance to present their evidence. And Mr. Blankenship is presumed innocent unless proven otherwise. He is charged with conspiring to evade workplace safety laws, which subsequently led to an April 2010 mine explosion outside Beckley, W.V. that killed 29 miners. The government is also alleging he filed false information with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Teck Resources Ltd posts massive $2.1 billion loss as it writes down resource assets – by Peter Koven (National Post – October 23, 2015)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Underneath the noise, Teck Resources Ltd. continues to perform pretty well.

The Vancouver-based miner has been under immense scrutiny from investors in recent weeks, as three rating agencies have cut its credit rating to junk status. It is grappling with poor commodity prices and huge spending requirements in the oilsands. And on Thursday, it reported a massive third-quarter loss of $2.1 billion due to non-cash impairment charges.

Despite those overhanging issues, investors are giving the company credit for continuing to deliver solid operating results. The stock rose 43 cents or five per cent to $8.79 on Thursday as Teck reported an adjusted profit of $29 million, or five cents a share, which was well above expectations.

“The commodities cycle continues to provide a very challenging environment, but we are responding,” chief executive Don Lindsay said on a conference call.

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India looks to buy South African coking coal mines – by Krishna N Das/Reuters (Business Day Live – October 20, 2015)

http://www.bdlive.co.za/

NEW DELHI — India is in talks to buy South African coal mines to feed its expanding steel industry, Coal Secretary Anil Swarup said, adding that New Delhi also hoped to stop imports of coal used to generate power in three years as domestic output jumps.

After years of poor production crippling power supply, state-run Coal India is boosting output at a record pace to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s goal of connecting to the grid millions of Indians who still use kerosene lamps.

But India, which wants to triple its steel capacity to 300-million tonnes by 2025, did not have enough reserves of coking or steel-making coal, prompting Coal India to look at assets abroad, Mr Swarup told the Reuters Global Commodities Summit on Monday.

“They are presently in negotiations with people in SA,” Mr Swarup said. “We imported around 80-million to 90-million tonnes of coking coal last (fiscal) year, and if that is the amount that can come through a mine owned by Coal India, it would consider it.”

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COLUMN-Coal’s blind optimism fades, but industry must shrink to succeed – by Clyde Russell (Reuters U.S. – October 20, 2015)

http://www.reuters.com/

Oct 20 (Reuters) – Battered and beaten, the coal industry finally seems to be moving from blind optimism that things will somehow get better to a more realistic hope that it can survive, albeit in a smaller, less influential manner.

A common theme at coal conferences over the past few years is that prices have finally reached a bottom and that a recovery is just around the corner.

Given that global coal benchmarks are currently in their fourth consecutive year of declines, this has clearly been an optimistic view, based more on fervent hope than a sober analysis of the state of the industry.

But at the World Coal Leaders Network conference in Barcelona this week there appeared to be a greater acceptance of coal’s diminishing role in power generation, the rising political and environmental obstacles the fuel faces and an acceptance that low prices are here to stay and the glory days ended in 2011.

There were even a few analysts and industry leaders prepared to say that prices have reached, or are very close to the bottom of the cycle, but these cautiously optimistic views came with enough caveats to ensure that ‘bullish’ still isn’t a word used very much in the coal world.

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Glencore woes cast shadow over coal M&A – by Sarah McFarlane (Reuters U.S. – October 20, 2015)

http://www.reuters.com/

BARCELONA – Oct 20 Glencore’s efforts to reduce debts to turn around its share price will limit its ability to do deals on coal assets and its absence is expected to slow consolidation in the depressed sector.

As the largest shipper of thermal coal, Glencore has been omnipresent in deals concerning assets in the sector, where a glut of supply has sent prices to multi-year lows, prompting expectations for a wave of consolidation among miners.

This changed in September, however, when Glencore succumbed to shareholder pressure and announced plans to reduce its debt to $20 billion from the current $30 billion, including a share issue and asset sales.

“Glencore, if they had been financially powerful, would have accelerated the consolidation of the thermal coal industry,” a trader at a mining company said.

Glencore declined to comment on its ability to make acquisitions.

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BookFilter: Homer Hickam, The Author Whose Story Inspired “October Sky,” Soars Again – by Michael Giltz (Huffington Post – October 14, 2015)

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Best-selling author Homer Hickam has enjoyed a varied and acclaimed career, ranging from decorated Vietnam veteran to scuba instructor to working as an aerospace engineer at NASA where he contributed to spacecraft design and crew training. Hickam even had a satisfying creative outlet in a stream of magazine articles capped by an honest-to-goodness military history hit about U-boats attacking the US coast during World War II. Called Torpedo Junction, it was published by the Naval Institute Press (the first home of Tom Clancy), got great reviews and is still in print today.

But all that is dwarfed by the Cinderella story of his first memoir. It began as an article commissioned by the relatively obscure Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine in 1995. Hickam talked about growing up as a kid in coal mining country and how Sputnik inspired he and his friends to start shooting off rockets with gleeful abandon and scientific rigor, scoring a top prize at the national science fair when kids from coal mining towns never even went to science fairs.

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X2 Said to Be Last Remaining Bidder for Rio Australia Mines – by Brett Foley, Dinesh Nair and Thomas Biesheuvel (Bloomberg News – October 12, 2015)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

X2 Resources, the private-equity firm founded by former Xstrata Ltd. chief Mick Davis, has emerged as the last remaining bidder for control of two Rio Tinto Group coal mines in Australia, people with knowledge of the matter said.

X2 is progressing in negotiations with Rio as the other interested parties, including Glencore Plc and New Hope Corp., are no longer in talks to buy the assets in New South Wales state’s Hunter Valley region, according to the people. The mine stakes may fetch more than A$3 billion ($2.2 billion), one of the people said, asking not to be identified because the talks are private.

Rio Chief Executive Officer Sam Walsh has sold $4.5 billion of less-profitable assets since January 2013, reducing its coal portfolio amid falling prices in order to focus on larger iron ore and copper operations. Any deal would be the first purchase for Davis’s X2 fund since he raised several billion dollars from investors to pursue mining acquisitions.

New Hope, which agreed last month to buy Rio’s 40 percent stake in the Bengalla coal venture in Australia for $606 million, isn’t pursuing the other mines Rio is selling in the country, according to the people.

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South Africa: Latest Strike to Paralyse SA Mining Sector – by Savious Kwinika (All Africa.com – October 5, 2015)

http://allafrica.com/

Johannesburg — Mining is set to grind to a halt as 30 000 South African mine workers down their tools amid demands for a salary increment.

The workers, who are demanding salary increment of between 8,5 percent to 14 percent, have vowed not to resume work until their demands are met.

Mine workers at the Anglo Coal, Glencore, Exxaro Coal Mpumalanga, Kangra, Koornfontein, Delmas and Msobo Mine were on Sunday issued with the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation, and Arbitration (CCMA) certificate of non-resolution to the dispute, paving way for an industrial action.

“The conciliation came to an abrupt end this week when the parties could not reach an agreement over the R1000 for the lowest category and 14% for the artisans, miners and officials demand by the National Union of Mineworkers,” said NUM Chief Negotiator in the coal sector, Peter Bailey Bailey.

He said Anglo Coal and Glencore were offering the lowest paid workers an increment of 8,5 percent for the artisans. Miners and officials were offered 7 percent.

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The Fall Of King Coal – by Tim Murphy (Mother Jones Magazine – November/December 2015)

http://www.motherjones.com/

After 29 men died in his company’s mine, Don Blankenship is fighting to stay out of prison. But he’s already won the battle to convert coal country to his brand of conservative politics.

THE PEOPLE OF the Kentucky and West Virginia borderland, where Don Blankenship’s family has lived for generations, have always clustered, out of tradition and necessity, along river valleys and in low-lying hollows amid the nubby Appalachian peaks. The winding roads there, crumbling under the weight of overloaded Mack trucks, are lined with trailers like the one Blankenship grew up in, many with “Friend of Coal” placards in their windows.

But at the peak of his 18-year reign as the CEO of coal giant Massey Energy—as if in a symbolic nod to his rise from hardscrabble roots—Blankenship erected a four-story villa that evoked a fairy-tale castle on a Kentucky mountaintop. It was a short helicopter ride from his primary home, a gated estate on the other side of the Tug Fork River. From a white tower atop his Massey-owned mountain retreat, Blankenship could look out on the coal yards and misty hollows of West Virginia’s Mingo County like a king surveying his domain.

Blankenship earned his way to this summit by reducing many of the nearby mountaintops to heaps of gravel and harvesting the bituminous seams inside them to nearly triple his company’s revenue.

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Death Toll in Xinjiang Coal Mine Attack Climbs to 50 (Radio Free Asia – September 30, 2015)

http://www.rfa.org/english/

The death toll in a knife attack orchestrated by alleged “separatists” at a coal mine in northwestern China’s troubled Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has climbed to at least 50 people—including five police officers—with as many as 50 injured, according to local security officials who say nine suspects are on the run.

The attack occurred on Sept. 18, when a group of knife-wielding suspects set upon security guards at the gate of the Sogan Colliery in Aksu (in Chinese, Akesu) prefecture’s Bay (Baicheng) county, before targeting the mine owner’s residence and a dormitory for workers.

When police officers arrived at the mine in Terek township to control the situation, the attackers rammed their vehicles using trucks loaded down with coal, sources said.

Three sources, including a ruling Communist Party cadre from a local township government, told RFA’s Uyghur Service in recent days that at least 50 people were killed and as many as 50 injured in the attack—with most casualties suffered by the mine’s largely majority Han Chinese workers.

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Coal threatens Poland’s image as European role-model – by Marcin Goettig (Reuters U.S. – October 1, 2015)

http://www.reuters.com/

WARSAW, Oct 1 (Reuters) – Coal mining has taken centre stage in the campaign for this month’s parliamentary election in Poland, an outsize political role that threatens the country’s hard-won economic growth and reputation in Europe.

Once a pillar of the communist-era economy, coal mines escaped the “shock therapy” that helped turn Poland into one of the European Union’s most resilient economies and a role-model for the rest of the bloc in investors’ eyes.

Successive governments have shrunk the sector, but kept it in state hands, conscious of public support for the miners, whose predecessors lost lives opposing martial law in 1981 and helped overthrow communism.

The mines have lost more than $850 million since the start of 2014 as coal prices slipped to decade lows, and efforts to prop them up have brought Poland into conflict with the European Union on both competition and environmental grounds.

The bloc wants to cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050, and the highly polluting Polish hard coal sector will come under further scrutiny with the approach of talks on a global climate deal in late November.

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West Virginia Miners Play Second Fiddle to the Molly Maguires – by Mark Hand (Counter Punch.com – September 29, 2015)

http://www.counterpunch.org/

In search of improved working conditions and livable wages, mine workers in two major coal producing states resorted to violence against coal mine owners and managers. The militants in one of those states are celebrated as heroic fighters of America’s industrial age. In the other state, the miners’ campaign for human progress is omitted from state history books.

In Pennsylvania, the state contributed funds to build a monument to honor the Molly Maguires, a secretive Irish organization that allegedly killed coal company officials as retribution for their treatment of miners. In museums and gift shops in the state’s anthracite coal region, visitors can purchase t-shirts and other memorabilia honoring the Mollies, 20 of whom were hanged after they were found guilty of murder and other serious charges in the late 1870s.

A big-budget Hollywood movie, titled The Molly Maguires, was released in 1970 with a radical coal miner, played by Scottish actor Sean Connery, as the hero and a Pinkerton detective, played by Irish actor Richard Harris, as the anti-hero.

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BHP Billiton sees strong earnings growth even in low carbon world (Reuters U.S. – September 29, 2015)

http://www.reuters.com/

MELBOURNE – BHP Billiton, the world’s largest miner, said on Tuesday it sees its earnings doubling over the next 15 years, even in a world where carbon emissions are cut to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

Under pressure from UK investors who fear fossil fuel assets could become worthless under tough climate policies, BHP released analyses of its copper, coal, oil, gas, potash, uranium and iron ore assets showing the company will hold up well under what it considers the most realistic scenarios.

Even with the 2 degrees C limit – equivalent to a rise of about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit – that has been set for UN climate talks later this year, demand in 2030 for all of BHP’s commodities except thermal coal would be higher than in 2014.

Uranium would be the biggest winner as more nuclear power would be needed, BHP said. “In this scenario, our portfolio remains resilient, and our analysis indicates that margins remain strong and even increase in some commodities,” Chief Commercial Officer Dean Dalla Valle told reporters ahead of an investor briefing in London.

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