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| Roger Kujawa posted NICE OLDER PEABODY COAL COMPANY COAL MINING STICKER |
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Michael Davis photo from Homestead
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The perfect storm of the invention of horizontal drilling and fraking making natural gas cheaper; greedy railroad companies?; events such as rising oceans, shrinking arctic ice and Antarctica ice shelves falling apart making it harder to deny climate warming caused by CO2 emissions; electric windmills becoming economically viable; and the general dirtiness (e.g. land scaring) and danger of coal mining is causing coal producers to go bankrupt. Peabody is the third one I have read about, and it is the nations largest.
But my main motivation for this posting is to record some links about coal mining in Western Kentucky. The second link accesses some web pages that contain some neat pictures.
Update: I found an April 14, 2016, clipping from the Chicago Tribune. One item I left out of the "perfect storm" list was the economic slowdown in China. They emphasized the plummet of gas prices because of the extraction of oil and gas from shale rock as a big cause as power companies switched their boilers to burn gas instead of coal. They are also burdened with the debt of paying $5.2 billion in 2011 to buy Macarthur Coal of Australia. "It became the world's largest publicly held coal company amid the oil embargo of the 1970s." (My first thought when I saw the qualifier "publicly" is that some family owned business was bigger. Then I realized that it probably is some government that owns more mines.) They plan to keep running the mines during the bankruptcy.
The May 31, 2016 Chicago Tribune has an article on "Taxpayer, states at risk as reclamation crises looms". In addition to Peabody, Alpha Natural Resources and Arch Coal are also bankrupt. The 1977 Surface Mining and Reclamation Act required coal companies to restore the mines when they ran out of coal as a condition for leasing land to mine. But the act allowed them to self-bond. That is basically an IOU instead of "dedicated assets or bonds backed by third-party investors." Taxpayers may end up paying the $3.3 billion needed to clean up the mines because the companies where allowed to set aside "fictional (my term) money" ("Monopoly money" also comes to mind) for mine restoration.
MidwesternEngergyNews has more information about Peabody's ability to clean up its mines.
Lennie Hanner posted two images with the comment: "A few days ago Roger Kujawa posted a very interesting Peabody sticker. Here is the complete set."
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