As the chart to the right shows, coal consumption in the United States has been trending downward for nearly a decade. And if you’ve paid attention to the public debate, you probably heard two competing explanations for coal’s collapse. One narrative—the one that the coal industry wants us all to believe—holds that federal policymakers waged … Read more
Just a few days ago the news media buzzed over the revelations that the US Secretary of Commerce had concealed his business ties to Vladimir Putin. And many press accounts prominently mentioned a name I’d heard before: Gennady Timchenko, a Putin crony and former co-CEO of a multinational commodity trading firm. I’m hardly a Kremlinologist, … Read more
Cloud Peak Energy—a company that once put Asian coal exports at the center of its corporate growth plans—released its quarterly earnings last Thursday. And yet again the company reported some rather gloomy news about its coal export business: for the eleventh consecutive quarter, Cloud Peak’s export arm lost money. The loss was small: just under … Read more
The Thin Green Line all started in 2010 with a coal export proposal at Longview, Washington, on the Columbia River. Backed by an unscrupulous Australian company, the Millennium Bulk project would have shipped by rail and then vessel a staggering 44 million tons of coal per year to markets in Asia. Today, the Washington Department … Read more
Even before amendments come in about its environmental impacts, the last of six coal terminals proposed for the Pacific Northwest is on the ropes, having been denied a crucial sublease by the Washington Department of Natural Resources. And the coal dust it would release into the surroundings may be the final nail in its coffin. … Read more
Another month, another coal export project down the tubes. This time it’s the proposed Chuitna mine in Alaska, a controversial export project launched a few years ago near the peak in the Pacific Rim coal bubble. After submitting several thousand pages of permitting documentation, the project backers had no choice but to shelve the project … Read more
The tsunami of bankruptcies that overwhelmed the US coal industry over the past two years has largely subsided—but it left an unprecedented path of financial wreckage in its wake, wiping out shareholders, decimating balance sheets, and stranding billions of dollars in loans that will never be repaid. There’s been an unexpected upside to this financial chaos, however: an … Read more
In another sign of the collapsing prospects for West Coast coal exports, Cloud Peak Energy—one of the largest coal producers in the American West and the best positioned coal exporter in the vast Powder River Basin—recently announced that it had extricated itself from long-term contracts to move coal into Pacific Rim markets. It was a costly … Read more
When State Public Lands Commissioner Peter Goldmark denied a key lease for a proposed coal export terminal on Tuesday, he may have ended a fight that had dragged on more than six years. That’s how long the coal industry had been trying to build coal terminals in the Pacific Northwest. In the fall of 2010, … Read more
Sightline is releasing a new report today—Unfair Market Value II: Coal Exports and the Value of Federal Coal—documenting massive exports of federally owned coal over the last decade. The US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) sold private companies the right to mine this coal for a pittance—in some cases, for less than 20 cents per ton. … Read more