Coal mining in Appalachia making a rebound?

[dan_bgblue]

Credit to President Trump?

ukblue, if you see this, I hope you are willing to share your thoughts

Thanks

[DanISSELisdaman]

Dan, I think are companies are confident that Trump is going to give them what they need to operate with a profit and they're starting up their operations again. I've heard of at least 4 mines re-opening in this area since he was inaurgurated. A couple of them were big operations. All together, it would amount to around a 1000 jobs. Obama almost accomplished what he promised to do.

[ukblue]

It will be very hard to jumpstart. Most of the experienced miners have either left or taken early retirement. While what Trump is doing will benefit large companies the small ones will find it almost impossible. Compensation for example has gone thru the roof. For every payroll dollar a employee earns we must pay 42 cents to KEMI. Now if they make it so other companies can come in to complete that will drive prices down and really help small mine owners. Most large companies have self insurance in place.
Someone needs to walk into MSHA and tell them that anyone that hasn't at least been on a coal mine property to leave 80% of them would have to leave. About 10 years ago they instituted a new policy that they didn't want people with mining experience because their thinking was prejudiced to their goals. For example they hired a kid that lives below me that drove a delivery truck for Mother Nature water, sent him to school for 16 weeks and sent him out to inspect mining. Now he tells us what to do and the cumulative experience of mining experience at one mine is over 400 hundred years.

If any rules are changed it will shock me because all MSHA has to say is safety and it is impenetrable. Most of the people making new mines regulations have never been in a coal mine.

Prices for overseas contracts will have the biggest affect to increased mining. Right now the company that we sell to has contracts that will increase in May and have said that they will need more coal from everyone.
What Tump did is a start but he will have to do much more imo.
Hope this helps a little Dan.

[ukblue]

One other thing that I forgot to mention is the cost of insurance. We furnish our employees their insurance. Our cost for a family plan is a little over 21,000 dollars a year. We simply cannot do this much longer and we have already received notice that our insurance and compensation are both going up substantially in another month.

[dan_bgblue]

ukblue, you shared a lot of good information, most of which I did not know, especially the info about the MSHA inspectors. IMO, no one that does not have several years of experience working underground should be making regulations and or telling miners and their employers how to do their job safely.

Is KEMI the only option mine owners have for workman's comp insurance?

I think you should package up your thoughts and send them to the President. I think he would be receptive to constructive ideas on how to pump up the Appalachian economy thru the money supplied by the independent small mine operations. If he is willing to take on EPA, and the CIA he sure as heck won't be worried about taking on MSHA and telling them to get their house in order.

Thanks for taking the time to respond

[CitizenBBN]

ukblue, thanks for the great info. It's amazing how different things are from the news and politics from actually talking to the boots on the ground, in any industry or situation.

I think he'll be able to help, but as you said there's a lot of ground to cover.

re KEMI I don't pay that much, but it's still a big chunk for me. It's obviously a massive burden for coal companies.

[ukblue]

Another major implement will be MSHA has been given regulatory enforcement to all metal and non metal mining. Gold, copper, limestone and potassium for example. They have a 1% dust standard that they must be in compliance with. They use respirators and filtered helmets to meet that standard. They will be implementing that 1%standard at any time now. They will not be allowing us to use the equipment the other industries use to meet that standard. Every employee will be required to wear a dust monitor and if his alarm goes off you have to move him to a lower dust area. Unfortunately there are none of those so we might have to have 3-4 miner men per shift . The problem with this standard is that it couldn't be met if you were standing beside the road .

[ukblue]

Dan, my father was a mining inspector. He had to pass a civil service test, have 5 years of underground mining and while not required they liked it if you had a underground mine foreman papers which he had as well as electrical papers . Ky used to require that you tested for methane with a flame safety lamp which you had to have mine foreman papers to test with it. Several years ago MSHA went away from the lamp to a electrical hand held units. Most of the federal mine inspectors weren't qualified to use the flame safety lamp.

[dan_bgblue]

Does the coal mining industry still use limestone dust for fire prevention in the mine?

And what is their public reason for not allowing the mine operators to use the safety equipment allowed for other mining operations?

[CitizenBBN]

Those are the subtle rules that the government uses to break things they don't like, and get away with it b/c it can't be attacked easily in sound bytes. They can claim safety or "public interest" or whatever, but the real goal is to strangle something they dont' want.

The EPA and environmental movement have become experts at it, and MSHA is all part of the same cabal. Mining, logging, oil and gas, it's been the same tactic across the board.

The thing is the vast majority of those rules are administrative, not legislative. Congress abdicated it's responsibility to bureaucrats who should not have that power. The interesting thing with Trump is that he's now in charge of those people, and a lot of that may be able to get undone. We'll see.

But long term it's still bad, b/c these groups will never be pro-development unless you fire everyone in the agency an start over.

[Darrell KSR]

Really cool stuff to read, if you don't mind me saying so. I know this is very personal and very important, but I feel like one of the cool kids with inside knowledge here.

[dan_bgblue]

But long term it's still bad, b/c these groups will never be pro-development unless you fire everyone in the agency an start over.

That does not sound like a bad course of action. Though probably the most acceptable is to cut off the head and let the worker bees know that they have a new direction for their business of serving the public.

[CitizenBBN]

The EPA, MSHA and related groups have all been co-opted. In the old days with the ICC it was the industry taking over the agency, now it is the environmental movement taking over the entities regulating the industries they want to shut down.

In the end the ICC was shut down. I'm fine with doing that to the EPA nad the others and starting over. In the end no matter how you cut it Jefferson was right, periodically you need a little revolution to clear the decks of institutions that will inherently move towards corruption and power concentration. The wisest of men for a long time have known that institutions will always tend to those problems, and the only real solution any of them have come up with is blowing it up and starting over periodically.

The Founders did a great job forestalling it, but it's inexorable. The only solution is a periodic reset or hoping for a benevolent robot overlord immune from corruption a la "The Day the Earth Stood Still".

[ukblue]

Yes we do Dan. Most electrical units usually require 5 50 lb. bags of rock dust and a 20 lb. fire extinguisher. MSHA has required, with their extensive knowledge, that we run water fire extinguisher hoses over top of electrical belt boxes. 10 kinds of crazy.

[DanISSELisdaman]

You gotta be kidding me! Nancy Pelosi would know that's a crazy requirement! I agree that the EPA should be shut down and replaced. They will never work with mine operators, but will continue to try shut down mining. They have too many tree huggers in that agency. I was an equipment operator for a surface mine operation and the best permit we ever had was shut down permanently, because they claimed they found a few Black Sided Dace minnows in the creek below the permit. They claimed they found 67 of them before we started mining and checked it again after we had been mining for a year and only found 47. This was in a creek that traveled over a mile before it emptied into the river.

[ukblue]

The EPA and MSHA have both been hiring far left people with anti-mining agendas.
I read a article the other day where a EPA guy was bitterly stating that they had done all this work with regulations and permits and they were in sight of their goals and Trump comes along and destroys it. Lets hope he cuts their budget and manpower by 25% that I have heard could be coming.

[DanISSELisdaman]

I hope so! I wish there was a way that he could shut the EPA down and replace it with something that would take a sensible approach at protecting the environment, while still leaving coal (and other companies) room to operate. MSHA has gone completely away from what it's intended purposes were IMO. It needs overhauling from top to bottom.

[ukblue]

States do about 90 %of the actual inspections now but have to follow federal guidelines. Federal judges have ruled on 2 different occasions that the epa did not have the power to deny permits on laws they were instituting themselves. When asked about it the EPA said they were going to keep doing what they wanted to do. I can't figure out why someone wasn't led out of the epa in cuffs.

[DanISSELisdaman]

Well, they were Obamas henchmen. It may be a different thing now if they insist on traveling the same road.

[CGWildcat]

Very fascinating to read. Always had so much respect for our miners. Thanks ukblue!

[bigsky]

I was an EmShaw certified safety instructor back in the day. Coal isnt going to be back at 800k jobs. Be lucky if they hang onto 100k. That job erosion is huge, but imagine what it will be as truck driving, the #1 blue collar guy industry, is automated. And battery cars get better. The internal combustion/oil&gas makes coal look tiny. Job dislocation is the #1 theeat to america, and we have to solve at least 2/3s of it to survive

[DanISSELisdaman]

That's true, but to the people of Appalachia, Coal is king. The livelihood of so many people depends on jobs either directly, or indirectly associated with the coal companies. It's one of the things that you have to live to really see the damage that has been done to eastern KY ans other areas like it that depends so much on coal for a living. Even those that have found jobs are not being paid nearly what they were making while working for coal companies.

[PedroDaGr8]

That's true, but to the people of Appalachia, Coal is king. The livelihood of so many people depends on jobs either directly, or indirectly associated with the coal companies. It's one of the things that you have to live to really see the damage that has been done to eastern KY ans other areas like it that depends so much on coal for a living. Even those that have found jobs are not being paid nearly what they were making while working for coal companies.

This has been the same story across a WIDE range of industries in middle America. Unfortunately, I think that in the end this is just going to be a blip on the death spiral for coal. A combination of renewable energy and natural gas right now is already price competitive with coal and in many cases beating coal. China is rapidly decoupling from coal because they can't afford the environmental effects. These not being CO2 but mercury, lead, cadmium, nickel, tin and arsenic. On top of that you have the nanomater sized carbon particulate matter (PM2.5 and smaller) which cause extensive lung issues. China being the size they are and having the pollution issues they do are making a concerted effort to reduce or eliminate coal from their energy reserves.

When you exclude the massive subsidies that coal and oil companies receive, wind and solar already beat coal on cost pretty handily. Right now, the only thing holding renewables back is not price, it is energy storage. A few technologies are on the horizon which will change that. At that point, coal is fundamentally dead. Already, even if there were only sensible environmental regulations, very few companies would look to expanding or building new coal fired power plants. There will be huge subsidies to induce this build out strictly to keep the coal industry alive, but in the long run it is like putting a band-aid on a MRSA infection.

I understand why you fight for the rural regions Dan, I do. It is a region that desperately needs somebody fighting for it. Unfortunately, the coal economy is on its last legs due to economic and external pressures, not just environmental. This is a fight which in the long run is economically unwinnable. Something has to be done for the region, but bringing coal back is just delaying the inevitable.

When Obama worked to cut coal, he did it stupidly with no consideration for what to do with the region. Unfortunately, the Republican's goal of bringing coal back (even by allowing the coal mines to pollute heavily) is too little too late. They care more about scoring points instead of how to revitalize a damaged region. Basically, the region is screwed by both sides and no better off in the long run than it was a year ago.

[CitizenBBN]

When you exclude the massive subsidies that coal and oil companies receive, wind and solar already beat coal on cost pretty handily.

I'll need significant proof of this supposition.

Yes they get tax breaks, but solar gets the same kind of breaks plus funding and still fails to stack up. That doesn't include the downstream regulation and costs heaped on oil/gas fueled items versus solar.

[ukblue]

Coal and oil cost about 4 cents per kilowatt to produce energy. Solar and wind both cost around 25 cents per kilowatt. Add that cost of a 26 cent subsidy both cost at some time will be unfeasible.

[DanISSELisdaman]

Coal has long been the biggest and best competition to oil and gas and has therefore helped keep the cost of producing energy down. When there's no competition, Big Oil can name their price.

[ukblue]

Over 98% of coal production is mined by non-union mining. Yet we are regulated and those regulations enforced by a union organization. The biggest conflict of interest that I have ever seen. In 1981 the federal government imposed a .50 cents a ton black lung tax that would have the program solvent by 1994. There was a problem that arose however. The UMWA medical and retirement fund basically was broke. The federal government, in their infinite wisdom, decided to keep that fifty cents a ton tax on all the non union mines that is still active today and give it to the umwa. Now this is where it gets good, when Obama decided to get rid of coal mining he was essentially taking away the umwa retirees retirement and medical cards. My wife and I both have family members that have received notification that they will not have access to either in the very near future.

[DanISSELisdaman]

ukblue, I have some friends that have received the same notification.

[ukblue]

They federal government used to require every miner to get a xray every 3 years at the operators expense. Now they have their own mobile xray lab doing it free every year. Now I may be wrong but there is a black lung fund in D.C. that has 50 billion dollars in it. If they can prove that they have basically ended black lung in coal miners what is to become of the 50 billion dollars?

[dan_bgblue]

I think we all know it will disappear in the budget without so much as a thank you and be forever forgotten by those in Washington.