Coal Exports Increase While Coalfield Communities Still Face Crisis

By Nick Mullins - The Thoughtful Coal Miner, May 1, 2018

I just read an article in the Williamson Daily News about increases in coal production as the result of coal exports. At first, this may seem like a good thing, at least until one thinks about it from a slightly different perspective.

The mine where I worked produced high-grade metallurgical coal used to produce steel. It was mined near Clintwood, Virginia in Dickenson County, trucked to the preparation plant in Coeburn, Virginia then loaded on to Norfolk Southern trains bound for the coal export terminals on the coast. Most often our coal went to the Dominion Terminal in Newport News owned by Alpha Natural Resources. From there, our coal went to the world market.

In 2007-08, we were told that most of the coal was going to Europe where peak market prices reached $350 per ton. This is quite substantial seeing as our mine alone was producing an average of 1.7 million tons of coal annually with a workforce of only around 300 miners. Then came the market bust.

The company began issuing memos explaining that most of the world’s steel blast furnaces were ceasing production. Not long after, a helicopter full of investors from India landed at our mine to receive a tour. We were later informed that thanks to natural disasters in Australia, and Alpha’s top-notch global coal sales team, our mine would not be idled.

At the time I didn’t think too much about it. I was happy that Alpha was able to sell coal and I was able to maintain a high paying job in an area decimated by mono-economic poverty. Years later I see things much differently.

Out of curiosity, I went to went to the US Energy Information Administration and began digging around to uncover the total worth of coal produced by the mine were I worked, Paramont’s Deep Mine #26. First I determined that the mine produced 17,595,507 tons of coal from 2002 to 2016. I then took the average annual export price for met coal over the same 14 year period and came up with an average price of $118.47 per ton. Paramont’s Deep Mine 26 produced a conservative $2 billion dollars’ worth of coal. If this one mine produced this much wealth in coal, one could not fathom what has been extracted from our county by multiple mines over the course of nearly a century.

The coal we were producing wasn’t helping our county, our nation, and certainly not the working class. It was going to foreign countries whose corporations were benefitting from the coal we sacrificed our health to extract. In the case of countries like India and China, US met coal was/is being used to produce steel with fewer environmental regulations and labor rights for the mill worker. The cheaper steel they produce as a result is then used to manufacture goods which end up in the US and sold back to us at big box stores for profits that keep the Walton’s in the top 1% of the world’s wealthiest people. Some steel does come back to the US to supply manufacturers here. Still it’s not much help for the working classes. Many manufacturers have switched to temp-to-hire agencies to provide their employees, often paying them less than a living wage, working them to death with mandatory overtime, and providing them with few if any benefits for their families.

The rich get richer and the poor get worked harder.

Naturally, all the $2 billion dollars of coal generated by Deep Mine 26 did not end up in the pockets of Paramont Coal Corporation, LLC a subsidiary of Alpha Natural Resources. The $2 billion was distributed along the trade chain, soaked up by company owners and investors including the coal company, its suppliers, the transportation companies, the steel producers, the product manufacturers, the retailers, construction companies, and anyone else who used the steel our coal produced.

But this is where it really gets annoying. During Deep Mine 26’s period of operation, the Dickenson County School System needed to replace its 50-year-old high schools and some of its 30-year-old elementary schools. When the new centralized Ridgeview High School was constructed in 2014-15, it came at a cost of roughly $110 million dollars, ninety-five percent of which was being funded by the US Army Corp of Engineers. Since that time the county has found it necessary to cut budgets and staff to survive. Just this past weekend, I heard first hand from teachers who were sourcing external funds for basic class supplies on their own.

These issues bring to light many questions. How much has the coal in Dickenson County been worth and why haven’t the companies who own it and produce it paid their fair share of taxes on it? Who are the local politicians allowing this to continue year after year, decade after decade? How did outside companies come to own all our mineral rights in the first place? Why didn’t our local politicians stand up against the unethical means by which they were purchased? Why haven’t there been investigations and lawsuits?

Why do we still remain so poor despite the billions of dollars of wealth that has left our county?

These are the problems that communities suffer when local, state, and federal politicians allow the exploitation of resources at the cost of local citizens within extraction-based economies. Year after year we contend with insufficient schools, insufficient health care, underfunded public services, and infrastructure. We barely receive just the basics. We fight just to get black lung benefits or workman’s compensation when we are injured. We have given so much that the social fabric of our communities has become threadbare. The hopelessness of our youth to find meaningful employment in or outside the region  leads many to become dependent upon government assistance or worse, to find darker paths towards drug abuse. And it is not our fault. This is the absolute meaning of injustice, and it came to us by the greed of outside investors and the corruption of local elites.

Our county, our region—indeed our entire nation—suffers when our coal ends up in foreign countries to power their industries. We need to educate ourselves about our local politicians and justice system, we need to demand answers.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.