Abandoned mine cleanup in Appalachia might be twice as expensive as thought, but little federal money is left to do it

Cleaning up abandoned mine lands in Appalachia might be twice as expensive as previously thought, but there's little federal money available to do it. 

"The federal AML inventory estimates that the cost of cleaning up all abandoned mine land – land that was mined before the passage of the Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act in 1977 – is $11 billion," Anya Slepyan reports for The Daily Yonder. "But a new report from the Ohio River Valley Institute shows the cost is more than double what the federal inventory previously claimed: $26 billion."

The 1977 law was the first major federal effort to regulate environmental impacts of coal mining. It "required that coal companies set aside money to pay for the restoration of all land permitted after the law’s implementation. The law also designated any land mined prior to 1977 as abandoned mine land, and set up a fund to reclaim these sites by collecting a small fee on each new ton of coal produced," Slepyan reports. "The AML fund has collected a total of $11.496 billion, of which only $2.23 billion remains." 

The new report shows that's not enough. "According to the report, of the 1.2 million acres designated as abandoned mine land, only 27% has been cleaned up since the 1970s," Slepyan reports. "The cost of reclaiming the remaining 850,000 acres is an estimated $26.3 billion, a price that will only increase if sites are left to degrade for decades more." Unreclaimed mine lands pose a significant environmental and financial threat to local communities, she writes.