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No union coal mines remain in Kentucky – by Dylan Lovan (Associated Press/Salt Lake City Tribune – September 3, 2015)

http://www.sltrib.com/

Harlan, Ky. – Kentucky coal miners bled and died to unionize.

Their workplaces became war zones, and gun battles once punctuated union protests. In past decades, organizers have been beaten, stabbed and shot while seeking better pay and safer conditions deep underground.

But more recently the United Mine Workers in Kentucky have been in retreat, dwindling like the black seams of coal in the Appalachian mountains. And now the last union mine in Kentucky has been shut down.

“A lot of people right now who don’t know what the [union] stands for is getting good wages and benefits because of the sacrifice that we made,” said Kenny Johnson, a retired union miner who was arrested during the Brookside strike in Harlan County in the 1970s. “Because when we went on those long strikes, it wasn’t because we wanted to be out of work.”

Hard-fought gains are taken for granted by younger workers who earn high wages now, leading the coal industry to argue that the union ultimately rendered itself obsolete.

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COLUMN – Seaborne coal market may shrink, total demand won’t – by Clyde Russell (Reuters India – September 3, 2015)

http://in.reuters.com/

LAUNCESTON, AUSTRALIA – It’s tempting to mould events to suit your view of how the world should be, and there seems to be plenty of that in the coal debate.

There is certainly enough evidence to suggest seaborne coal volumes are trending lower, but it’s probably a mistake to use the sector as a proxy for the total market.

Environmentalists are keen to see coal as a sunset fuel that should be phased out as soon as possible given its role as a major contributor to climate change.

They have been heartened by recent news of the closure of a small coal mine in Australia and the decision by the city council of Australia’s Newcastle, home to the world’s biggest coal export harbour, to divest from the fuel.

Falling imports by China and India, the two largest buyers of the dirty fuel, have also been cited as further evidence that coal is on the way out.

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Let Coal Die a Natural Death – by Editorial Board (Bloomberg News – September 1, 2015)

http://www.bloombergview.com/

Coal-fired electricity is becoming ever less profitable. That’s the good news — or it should be, since it gives power companies greater incentive to embrace cleaner and cheaper sources of energy.

But not every energy company is content to let the market guide its decision-making. In a role reversal, at least one energy company is asking regulators to intervene to keep coal profitable for a while longer.

In Ohio, the Public Utilities Commission is considering a request from the Akron company FirstEnergy to have consumers cover the higher cost of electricity from three aging coal plants. (One of these just underwent a $1.8 billion pollution-control upgrade to comply with federal law.)

The aim is to keep the plants open for another 15 years. Under this plan, FirstEnergy ratepayers could spend $3 billion more than necessary for electricity, according to the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, a state agency.

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Appalachian coal country wants Republican nod for federal aid – by Valerie Volcovici (Reuters U.S. – August 28, 2015)

http://www.reuters.com/

WASHINGTON – A small but growing number of Appalachian coal communities are urging Republicans in Congress to support a proposed $1 billion federal aid program from the Obama administration to save local economies ravaged by the decline of the coal industry.

Nearly a dozen Appalachian coal mining communities have passed resolutions over the past few weeks supporting President Barack Obama’s Power + program, which was outlined in his 2016 budget. It will be considered in the fall when Congress returns from recess.

From towns such as Norton, Virginia, to Letcher County, Kentucky, local officials have called on their Washington representatives to back the proposal that would provide public funds for new economic activities around reclaimed coal mines in the Appalachian Mountains.

“This isn’t a partisan issue here,” said Eric Dixon, policy coordinator for the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center in Whitesburg, Kentucky, which has helped push the resolutions across the region. “We have Republicans and Democrats in the mountains who support this plan.”

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China, US Seek ‘Clean Coal’ Agreement as Industry Struggles (Associated Press/New York Times – August 25, 2015)

http://www.nytimes.com/

BILLINGS, Mont. — U.S. and China officials took a major step Tuesday toward an agreement to advance “clean coal” technologies that purport to reduce the fuel’s contribution to climate change — and could offer a potential lifeline for an industry that’s seen its fortunes fade.

The agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and China’s National Energy Administration would allow the two nations to share their results as they refine technologies to capture the greenhouse gases produced from burning coal, said Christopher Smith, the Energy Department’s assistant secretary for fossil energy.

Terms of the deal were finalized late Tuesday. Officials said it would be signed at a later date.

Smith spoke after he and other senior officials from President Barack Obama’s administration met with representatives of China’s National Energy Administration during an industry forum in Billings. The discussions took place near one of the largest coal reserves in the world — the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, where massive strip mines produce roughly 40 percent of the coal burned in the U.S.

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Coal industry will be big loser from Paris climate deal – by Geoff Winestock (Australian Financial Review – August 24, 2015)

http://www.afr.com/business/mining/

A global agreement at the Paris climate change negotiations at the end of 2015 will cut the value of Australian coal exports by 8 per cent over the next 15 years and contract the economy by 1.6 per cent if governments around the world implement the policies they have proposed.

A study by economist and former Reserve Bank of Australia board member Warwick McKibbin shows that the coal industry, one of Australia’s biggest exporters, is shaping up as one of the big losers from pledges by China, Japan, the United States and Europe to curb carbon emissions.

Without any change there will be a 13 per cent increase in global coal production, Professor McKibbin estimates.

The value of Australia’s coal exports will be 8 per cent lower and global coal production will be 5 per cent lower by 2030 as a result of climate change policies to be proposed at Paris, the forecast shows.

While debate in Australia has focused on how ambitious to make this country’s emission reduction targets after 2020, the modelling underlines how choices by the rest of the world will be almost as important for the Australian economy.

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Wales: Brecon Beacons is spectacular, but what sets this national park apart is its human history – by Amanda Ruggeri (Globe and Mail – August 13, 2015)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

BRECON BEACONS, WALES – When our tour guide, a former miner, tells us that we’ll be descending 90 metres into the earth, no one in the group seems anxious. When we strap on headlamps – necessary accoutrements for navigating the lightless caverns far below – everyone takes it in stride.

But when he tells us we have to empty our pockets of anything with a battery, a few of us look surprised. “Sparks can come off watches or batteries because of the gases down there,” he explains. “You can’t bring anything like that down there.” Depositing my mobile phone in the bag he offers, I think to myself: Gases? What did I sign up for?

On the surface, much of this part of southern Wales is what you would expect, and hope, from a Welsh landscape: rolling hills and wild moors, market towns and crumbling castles. The area is dominated by Brecon Beacons, a 1,350-square-kilometre national park that twists with 225 km of rivers and peaks with mountains up to 886 metres tall. Sheep amble across bright-green hills, their coats splashed with blue and red.

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Bible in one hand, shovel in the other: Tony Abbott is for coal – by Laura Tingle (Australian Financial Review – August 20, 2015)

http://www.afr.com/

Booms and busts used to be in the very marrow of the Australian experience. The gold rushes remain a staple of our education. Until the last 20 years or so of continuous growth, the spectacular nature of the booms and busts in the economy set the rhythm and drama, not just of personal fortunes but politics.

Yet even in recent decades, there has been nothing like a mining boom to stir a swarm of political flies.

The trouble now is that the longest and most spectacular boom in our history has ended. But politicians don’t seem quite sure what to do about it.

Where to go next when your rhetoric is all supposed to be about jobs and growth, and reassuring people that the economy will continue to be okay, even as the boom fades?

You could focus on new areas of growth – for example, the government recently announced a doubling of the NBN workforce to 9000 – or you could grab on to signs that the resources boom isn’t entirely over with a project that is boasting will generate (a contested) 10,000 jobs.

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COLUMN-Coal’s pain from yuan devaluation may be less than feared – by Clyde Russell (Reuters U.S. – August 18, 2015)

http://www.reuters.com/

LAUNCESTON, Australia, Aug 19 (Reuters) – In theory the devaluation of the Chinese yuan should be negative for the country’s coal imports and Asian prices, but so far it’s not quite panning out that way.

There’s nothing wrong with the logic behind the view that purchases of foreign coal by the world’s largest importer may decline, given the relative advantage domestic coal has just received from the weakening of the yuan.

The Chinese currency fell about 3 percent in domestic trade last week after it was pushed lower by the People’s Bank of China, a move widely interpreted as aiming to boost the competitiveness of the struggling export sector.

It wouldn’t have been a surprise if the price of the international coal that heads to China declined in dollar terms, or that the price of domestic coal rose in yuan to reflect the new currency rates.

But Chinese domestic prices remained largely steady, with no change in the benchmark price of thermal coal at Qinhuangdao SH-QHA-TRMCOAL, which held at 410 yuan ($64) a tonne last week.

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[U.S. Coal] ET TU, TRIBE? – by Andrew Rice (New York Magazine – July 28, 2015)

http://nymag.com/

LAURENCE TRIBE, the president’s longtime confidant, is fighting the White House climate plan on behalf of Big Coal. His friends are furious at him, which breaks his heart.

Just after noon on June 18, Laurence H. Tribe, the nation’s foremost scholar of constitutional law, fired off an angry and anguished self-defense. “I just finished my roughly half-hour interview on WNYC with Brian Lehrer,” he wrote in an email to the publishers of his most recent book about the Supreme Court, Uncertain Justice. “I suppose I did well enough, but the interview was a complete disaster. Please let the Brian Lehrer Show know that I felt totally sandbagged.”

The appearance had begun innocuously, with a discussion of the most recent Supreme Court decisions — what the Harvard Law professor later called June’s “series of thunderclaps.” Tribe’s credentials as a liberal legal activist are the stuff of legend — counsel in Bush v. Gore, slayer of archconservative Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork — and he is as informed about the Court’s opaque inner workings as any outsider can be.

He taught Elena Kagan and John Roberts at Harvard and played an unusually involved role in Barack Obama’s education in the law; for a brief time during Obama’s first term, he served at the Justice Department.

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Polish Black-Hole Mining Risks Labor Unrest Before Election – by Maciej Martewicz and Dorota Bartyzel (Bloomberg News – August 16, 2015)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Poland’s struggle to help Kompania Weglowa SA, the European Union’s biggest coal producer, return to profitability risks unleashing union-led protests before October’s general election.

A threatened eruption of street demonstrations next month may seal Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz’s fate, with the ruling party already trailing the opposition in opinion polls. The cabinet extinguished demonstrations in January by scaling back its plans to shut unprofitable mines and agreeing to revamp Kompania with the aid of state-controlled utilities.

The government has missed two self-imposed deadlines for the overhaul and has a third looming on Aug. 31 as it seeks to stem the coal industry’s 1.4 billion-zloty ($372 million) loss in the first half of 2015.

Power producers are reluctant to invest in an industry they regard as a black hole, especially as this month’s heatwave triggered electricity supply curbs which, according to UBS AG analyst Michal Potyra, may raise calls for further investment in infrastructure by utilities.

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The Trick That’s Going to Keep America’s Coal Alive – by Mario Parker (Bloomberg News – August 11, 2015)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

A 30-year-old mining technique is becoming all that’s keeping a group of U.S. coal producers from joining their competitors in bankruptcy.

Coal, already locked in a battle with cheap natural gas, now faces federal environmental rules that threaten to reduce its share of power generation to the lowest in 66 years. Companies from Illinois to Northern Appalachia are responding by leaning more heavily than ever on longwall-mining, a technology that’ll be used to produce a quarter of America’s coal this year, up from 19 percent in 2013.

Investors are backing the miners who rely on the efficient approach. Think of a giant deli slicer with multiple revolving blades that cuts coal from a seam into slices. Eighty percent of analysts covering Foresight Energy LP and CNX Coal Resources LP, both known for longwall operations, recommend buying their shares, compared with less than a third for producers who use it less, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

“People ask me all the time, ‘What’s the new mining technology that saves coal?’” Jim Stevenson, director of North American coal for consultant IHS Inc. in Houston, said by phone July 31. “It’s the longwall. It’s the proliferation of this 30-year-old technology that’s keeping coal coming out of these basins.”

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Clinton strays from her roots as coal miner’s great granddaughter – by Valerie Volcovici and Amanda Becker (Reuters U.S. – August 10, 2015)

http://www.reuters.com/

WASHINGTON – In her 2008 bid for the White House, Hillary Clinton cast herself as a blue-collar Democrat who was unabashedly pro-coal, a stance that helped her beat opponent Barack Obama easily in primaries in states that produced or were reliant on coal.

Eight years later, a Reuters review of her recent campaign speeches and policy announcements shows that the great-granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner is now talking about the coal industry in the past tense.

The little-noticed shift in rhetoric speaks volumes about how the United States’ energy landscape has changed since Clinton last campaigned in 2008: oil and gas fracking have exploded and cheap natural gas has taken a huge bite out of coal.

In the intervening years the Obama administration has also proposed aggressive measures to tamp down greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels like coal, while once-powerful coal companies like Alpha Natural Resources, which declared bankruptcy last week, have lost their political clout.

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COLUMN-No breaks for coal miners from China, India imports – by Clyde Russell (Reuters U.K. – August 10, 2015)

http://uk.reuters.com/

LAUNCESTON, Australia, Aug 10 (Reuters) – It seems coal miners and traders just can’t catch a break, with a rebound in China’s imports being tempered by early signs of a turning point in India’s import growth.

The main problem for coal exporters such as Australia, Indonesia and South Africa is that China’s surge in imports in July is unlikely to be sustained, while India’s decline may well be the start of a longer-lasting trend.

China, the world’s biggest producer and importer of coal, brought in 21.26 million tonnes in July, up 28.1 percent from June’s 16.6 million and the highest in eight months, according to customs data released Aug. 8.

However, imports are down 7.7 percent on a year earlier and down 33.7 percent for the first seven months of 2015, making July’s month-on-month result an outlier in a overall weakening trend.

It’s also likely that July’s strength will remain an exception, rather than herald the reversal of the existing trend.

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GLOBE EDITORIAL: To glimpse the future of oil, look at coal in the U.S. (Globe and Mail – August 8, 2015)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

“We’re the first generation to feel the impact of climate change, and we’re the last generation that can do something about it,” Barack Obama said on Monday. The President backed up his words with the Clean Power Plan, a White House initiative that will almost certainly end coal-fired electricity production in the United States in the next decade.

There are five lessons in the announcement for Canada, which recently signed on to the G7 commitment to “decarbonize” the global economy by the end of the century.

Lesson 1: Greenhouse-gas emissions are a legitimate public-health issue. Mr. Obama has done an end run around Congress and unilaterally set regulations to cut carbon-dioxide emissions from electricity production by 32 per cent (compared with levels in 2005) by the year 2030.

He can do this under the Clean Air Act, which obliges the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate any pollutant that is a danger to public health. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that large amounts of carbon dioxide qualify as a dangerous pollutant, since they lead to climate change.

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