Coal companies and miners keep leaving Appalachia for energy boom in Wyoming, Montana

Coal companies are heading west where mining is cheaper, and with many Appalachian coal mines cutting jobs or shutting down, some workers in Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia are packing up and trekking their families thousands of miles to follow the coal boom to Wyoming and Montana, Tim Loh reports for Bloomberg. (Loh photo: Peabody Energy Corp.'s North Antelope Rochelle mine in Wyoming)

"With the U.S. coal industry in its worst decline in decades, companies including Alpha Natural Resources and Peabody Energy Corp., the biggest producer, are pivoting toward pockets of future profit," Loh writes. "No prospect is bigger than the Powder River Basin, a high, mineral-rich plain of yellow grass and sagebrush stretching from central Wyoming to southern Montana. Coal output in the Powder River Basin increased 2.6 percent in the first half from a year earlier while total U.S. production inched upward a mere 0.75 percent. Mines there are vast open holes that cost less than half to operate than those in West Virginia where workers head underground to extract the fuel."

"Peabody’s North Antelope Rochelle mine in Wyoming is the country’s biggest, with five pits that span 100 square miles," Loh writes. The company sold 123.3 million tons of Western U.S. coal in the first three quarters of the year, an increase of 4.6 percent from 2013, with most of the coal coming from the Powder River Basin.

Jobs are plentiful in areas like Campbell County, Wyoming, even if housing is not, Loh writes. Campbell County has an unemployment rate of 3 percent, well below the national average of 5.9 percent, with the region's mines supplying 41 percent of the country's coal. Gina Michael, visitor services manager with the Campbell County Convention & Visitors Bureau, told Loh, “We have more jobs than people and more people than housing.”
 
And it doesn't appear that the boom will end any time soon, Loh writes. "In Wyoming, it cost Alpha an average of $11.06 a ton to mine 17.4 million tons of coal in the first half of the year." Meanwhile, "the company spent an average of $63.86 a ton to extract Appalachian coal." (Read more)