United States Mining – Page 95

Obama Didn’t Kill Coal, the Market Did – by Michael R. Bloomberg (Bloomberg News – August 4, 2015)

August 4, 2015

http://www.bloombergview.com/

Critics of the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Clean Power Plan are describing it in apocalyptic terms. But much of what they believe about the plan — that it will destroy the coal industry, kill jobs and raise costs for consumers — is wrong. And it’s important to understand why.

The overblown political rhetoric about the plan tends to obscure the market reality that the coal industry has been in steady decline for a decade, partly as a result of the natural gas boom, but mostly because consumers are demanding cleaner air and action on climate change.

Communities across the U.S. have led the way in persuading utilities to close dirty old coal plants and transition to cleaner forms of energy. The Sierra Club’s grass-roots Beyond Coal campaign (which Bloomberg Philanthropies funds) has helped close or phase out more than 200 coal plants over the past five years.

The primary reason for the public revolt against coal is simple: It causes death, disease and debilitating respiratory problems. A decade ago, coal pollution was killing 13,000 people a year. Today, the number is down to 7,500, which means that more than 5,000 Americans are living longer, healthier lives each year thanks to cleaner power.

States Should Shun the EPA’s New Power Mandate – by Hal Quinn ad Peter Glaser (Wall Street Journal – August 2, 2015)

August 4, 2015

http://www.wsj.com/

The agency has failed to properly weigh the costs, even though the Supreme Court says it must.

On Monday President Obama is announcing the final version of his Clean Power Plan, the carbon-emission rules for power plants to secure his climate-change legacy. The plan is designed to hobble electricity generators much as the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2012 rule to reduce mercury and other emissions has harmed the coal industry.

Fortunately for consumers, on June 29 the Supreme Court slapped down the agency’s 2012 rule. In Michigan v. EPA, the court said the agency failed its legal obligation to compare the cost of its mercury standards with the benefits.

Reckless disregard for costs has also guided the agency’s Clean Power Plan. The White House promises Monday’s rule will offer more flexibility to meet emissions targets than an earlier draft, but the targets may be even more difficult to meet. That will force rate payers into steeper cost increases, and concessions the EPA makes to some states and industries will come at the expense of others.

White House set to adopt sweeping curbs on carbon pollution – by Joby Warrick (Washington Post – August 1, 2015)

August 4, 2015

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

The Obama administration will formally adopt an ambitious regulation for cutting greenhouse-gas pollution on Monday, requiring every state to reduce emissions from coal-burning power plants and putting the country on a course that could change the way millions of Americans get their electricity.

A retooled version of the administration’s Clean Power Plan, first proposed a year ago, will seek to accelerate the shift to renewable energy while setting tougher goals for slashing carbon emissions blamed for global warming, according to administration officials briefed on the details.

The new plan sets a goal of cutting carbon pollution from power plants by 32 percent by the year 2030, compared with 2005 levels — a 9 percent jump from the previous target of 30 percent — while rewarding states and utility companies that move quickly to expand their investment in solar and wind power.

Many states will face tougher requirements for lowering greenhouse-gas emissions under the revised plan.

New EPA rule on greenhouse gases the latest blow to King Coal – by Steven Mufson (Washington Post – August 1, 2015)

August 4, 2015

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

When coal was king, it fueled more than half of the nation’s electricity. It fired up American industry and powered an ever-growing variety of household appliances and electronics. And American presidential hopefuls paid homage to coal, courting mine owners and miners whose unionized ranks once numbered more than 400,000.

Barack Obama was no exception. As a state legislator in 2004 and again as a U.S. senator, he supported proposals for huge federal subsidies to turn coal into motor fuel and ease America’s reliance on oil imports. “With the right technological innovations, coal has the potential to be a cleaner-burning, domestic alternative to imported oil,” Obama said in June 2007.

All of that has changed. On Monday, the Obama administration takes on the coal industry with the final version of rules it has dubbed the Clean Power Plan, a complex scheme designed to reduce, on a state-by-state basis, the amount of greenhouse gases the nation’s electric power sector emits. The main target: coal.

Today, more people in the United States work jobs installing solar panels than work in the coal industry.

Birthplace of the A-bomb: Nuclear New Mexico: Past and future – by Tom Vaughn (Desert Exposure – August 2015)

August 4, 2015

http://www.desertexposure.com/

The atomic genie was let out of the bottle 70 years ago here in New Mexico. It can’t be put back in; nobody wants it to go away. Nuclear medicine, nuclear power, atomic clocks, nuclear propulsion in submarines and spacecraft … the technological advances made possible by atomic research are not to be given up. Yet the genie is still capable of destroying worlds, or at least wreaking havoc locally. The challenge today is to keep it corralled.

The earliest uses of uranium ores in New Mexico had nothing to do with radioactivity. Ground to a powder, the yellowish minerals were used by Native Americans to color designs on deerskin cradle-board coverings.

In the 1920s, low-grade uranium ores (autunite and torbernite) were recovered from old silver mines in the White Signal and Black Hawk mining districts west of Silver City for use in glazes and to color glass. Significant uranium deposits in these areas were identified during the uranium boom of the 1950s.

World War II gave birth to the Manhattan Project — a search for a super-weapon that could give its wielder a decisive victory. Building on earlier research into radioactivity and atomic physics, both Germany and the United States raced to produce an atomic bomb.

Coal’s Fortunes Keep Getting Worse – by James Stafford (Huffington Post – July 21, 2015)

July 22, 2015

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/business/

James Stafford is the editor of Oilprice.com.

The coal industry is in uncharted territory. After decades of strong financial numbers and dominance in the electric power sector, coal producers are starting to fall apart faster than anyone could have anticipated. SNL Financial has produced some jaw dropping data on the quickly deteriorating coal industry, with a horrific performance in the second quarter.

The U.S. coal mining sector has exhibited an unprecedented wave of turmoil in just the last few weeks.

Walter Energy, an Alabama coal miner, announced on July 15 that it is filing for bankruptcy. Senior lenders will see their debt turned into equity, and if the company cannot turn the ship around, it will more or less sell off all of its assets. “In the face of ongoing depressed conditions in the market for met coal, we must do what is necessary to adapt to the new reality in our industry,” Walter Energy’s CEO Walt Scheller said in a press release.

Alpha Natural Resources, a top producer of metallurgical coal (used for steelmaking), was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange because its share price was “abnormally low.” The company is eyeing the possibility of declaring bankruptcy protection.

Pictures from the atomic age: The AGO’s Camera Atomica exhibit is oddly poignant – by David Berry (National Post – July 21, 2015)

July 22, 2015

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

The first official image in Camera Atomica is an x-ray; the first x-ray, actually, taken by physicist Wilhelm Rontgen, of his wife’s hand (her wedding ring is still visible as a rather large lump).

The discovery of this miraculous technology — it “makes the invisible visible” curator John O’Brian proudly proclaims — was an accident. But it was also our first, fumbling step into the atomic age, our first grasp of a power that would come to (quite literally) rewrite the DNA of the human experience.

“When Rontgen’s wife saw it, she was shocked. She said, ‘I’ve seen my own death,’” O’Brian explains, pointing to the image and pausing for dramatic effect. “That sort of predicted some of the worst sides of it. But this shows you there’s really a fatal interdependence between the camera and nuclear fission.”

O’Brian’s exhibit gathers some of the most powerful photographic images of the last 120 years of nuclear power — not, he says, to get us to contemplate our own deaths, but to bring attention back to an issue that’s still humming in the background of our everyday life.

Lifton on asteroid mining rare earths and Molycorp’s Mountain Pass – by Jack Lifton (Investor Intel – July 20, 2015)

July 22, 2015

http://investorintel.com/

Some rules don’t change. But that doesn’t mean that our poorly educated journalists have to know of them or even have to understand them, when they are described or applied. One rule, frequently swept under the rug by junior mining promoters eager to take advantage of journalistic ignorance can be stated as:

“In order for any deposit to be developed into a profitable mine the infrastructure to access it must already exist, or, if not, then its costs must be included in the feasibility study.”

Trivially this means for example no commercial mining until I can get to the deposit and either process the material to a commercial form at the site or move it to a processing site without logistics’ costs destroying the project economics.

A corollary of the above “rule” is that the cost of infrastructure must be quantified and covered before the project enters development. Now, the above rules of economics having been stated let’s get to what I am talking about today.

In dispute over coal mine project, two ways of life hang in the balance – by William Yardley (Los Angeles Times – July 21, 2015)

July 21, 2015

http://www.latimes.com/

Crow Agency, Montana – Neither tribe created the modern energy economy. They did not build the railroads or the power plants or the giant freighters that cross the ocean.

But the Crow Tribe, on a vast and remote reservation here in the grasslands of the northern Plains, and the Lummi Nation, nearly a thousand miles to the west on a sliver of shoreline along the Salish Sea in Washington state, have both become unlikely pieces of the machinery that serves the global demand for electricity — and that connection has put them in bitter conflict.

The Crow, whose 2.2 million-acre reservation is one of the largest in the country, have signed an agreement to mine 1.4 billion tons of coal on their land — enough to provide more than a year’s worth of the nation’s coal consumption.

The Lummi, on a 13,000-acre peninsula north of Seattle, are leading dozens of other tribes in a campaign that could block the project. They say it threatens not only the earth’s future climate, but also native lands, sacred sites and a fragile fishery the Lummi and others have depended on for thousands of years.

For the Crow, the project is a matter of survival. Traffic at the Crow’s remote and modest casino provides no meaningful revenue, there are no reservation hotels and unemployment here is well into the double digits.

Mitsubishi Materials apologizes for using U.S. POWs as slave labor – by Mariko Lochridge (Reuters U.S. – July 20, 2015)

July 14, 2016July 20, 2015

http://www.reuters.com/

LOS ANGELES – Construction company Mitsubishi Materials Corp (5711.T) became the first major Japanese company to apologize for using captured American soldiers as slave laborers during World War Two, offering remorse on Sunday for “the tragic events in our past.”

A company representative offered the apology on behalf of its predecessor, Mitsubishi Mining Co, at a special ceremony at a Los Angeles museum.

“Today we apologize remorsefully for the tragic events in our past,” Mitsubishi Materials Senior Executive Officer Hikaru Kimura told an audience at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

In all, about 12,000 American prisoners of war were put into forced labor by the Japanese government and private companies seeking to fill a wartime labor shortage, of whom more than 1,100 died, said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, an associate dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Six prisoner-of-war camps in Japan were linked to the Mitsubishi conglomerate during the war, and they held 2,041 prisoners, more than 1,000 of whom were American, according to nonprofit research center Asia Policy Point.

Coal Producers Face New Stream Protection Rule From Interior – by Mark Drajem (Bloomberg News – July 16, 2015)

July 17, 2015

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Coal producers would be subject to new restrictions under an Obama administration proposal that would limit operations near streams and curb the disposal of waste, a plan that had been criticized even before it was issued.

The proposal from the Interior Department’s surface mining office, released Thursday, would replace a Bush-era regulation that was tossed out by a federal court. The rule would require companies to avoid mining practices that permanently pollute streams, destroy drinking water sources, increase flood risk or threaten forests.

“As we engage in mining, let’s do so in a way that helps mitigate the impact they can have on the environment,” Interior Department Secretary Sally Jewell said on a conference call. The rules would provide “a modern and balanced approach to energy development,” she said.

The rules won’t take effect until finalized, probably next year. They are meant to deal with the destruction of streams, watersheds, endangered species and forests tied to mountaintop mining for coal.

bama unveils new coal mining rules (The Hill – July 16, 2015)

July 16, 2015

http://thehill.com/

The Obama administration Thursday unveiled new standards meant to better protect streams in Appalachia from the controversial mountaintop removal coal mining process.

The proposed rule, from the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining (OSM), would update three-decade-old standards that create a buffer zone around streams, prohibiting mining activities and waste from getting near them and harming the ecosystem.

Administration officials characterized the rule as a common-sense approach that uses the best available science to protect streams and groundwater from the effects of mining.

But Republicans and industry leaders immediately blasted the rule as part of President Obama’s “war on coal” and challenged the idea that the 1983 standards need updating.

“These regulations are meant to protect human health and welfare by protecting our environment, while helping to meet the nation’s economic needs and supporting economic opportunity,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told reporters Thursday.

[Florida Mosaic mining] From Phosphate Mine to Golf Resort: Streamsong – by Robin Sussingham (WUSF News – July 15, 2015)

July 16, 2015

http://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/

In remote central Florida, land turned inside out by phosphate mining has been transformed yet again — this time as an upscale golf resort that’s getting a lot of attention in the golfing world. The thousands of acres of Mosaic land that makes up Streamsong may be depleted of phosphate — but it’s rich in something invaluable in the golf business. Sand.

It may seem like a surprisingly remote location for the Streamsong clubhouse and 216-room Lodge, complete with fine dining, infinity pool, spa and a modern, minimalist award-winning design of stone, wood and glass created by Tampa architect Alberto Alfonso. But Mosaic’s developers are betting that golfers will travel for a course that intrigues them.

Doug Smith is one of those golfers. He flew down from Tifton, Georgia, with a friend from Atlanta, and says the course is unlike anything else in Florida. “And, he says, it creates an opportunity for a good friend and I to come down, spend a couple of days, and kind of disappear.”

There are a lot of golf courses in Florida, But Scott Wilson, Streamsong’s Golf Director, says the fast and firm conditions here set it apart, as does the landscape.

The Latest Sign That Coal Is Getting Killed – by Tom Randall (Bloomberg News – July 13, 2015)

July 14, 2015

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Coal is a sick dragon, and the bond market wields a heavy sword

Coal is having a hard time lately. U.S. power plants are switching to natural gas, environmental restrictions are kicking in, and the industry is being derided as the world’s No. 1 climate criminal. Prices have crashed, sure, but for a real sense of coal’s diminishing prospects, check out what’s happening in the bond market.

Bonds are where coal companies turn to raise money for such things as new mines and environmental cleanups. But investors are increasingly reluctant to lend to them. Coal bond prices tumbled 17 percent in the second quarter, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Intelligence. It’s the fourth consecutive quarter of price declines and the worst performance of any industry group by a long shot.

Bonds fluctuate less than stocks, because the payoff is fixed and pretty much guaranteed as long as the borrower remains solvent. A 17 percent decline is huge, and it happened at a time when other energy bonds—oil and gas—were rising. Three of America’s biggest coal producers had the worst-performing bonds for the quarter: