And another one bites the dust… Starting six years ago, Washington and Oregon found themselves besieged by a flotilla of massive, well-financed companies hell-bent on building coal export terminals to feed Asia’s allegedly insatiable appetite for coal. But the coal industry’s vision of a robust export market turned out to be a mirage: starting in early 2011, international coal … Read more
Last month, Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest private coal company, filed for bankruptcy. And since 2012, about 50 coal companies in the United States have declared bankruptcy. As more and more coal companies go belly up, it’s an excellent time to examine the factors that are sinking the coal industry. Sightline’s director of energy finance Clark Williams-Derry takes … Read more
The big coal news of the day: Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal company and one of the main proponents of the Gateway Pacific coal export terminal outside of Bellingham, Washington, has officially filed for bankruptcy protection. And Reuters gets the reasons just right: Peabody Energy Corp, the world’s largest privately owned coal producer, … Read more
The executives of bankrupt coal industry giant Arch Coal, which declared itself insolvent back in February, apparently were quite proud of themselves for driving their company into the ditch. So proud, in fact, that they decided to give themselves $8 million in bonuses right before filing bankruptcy paperwork. Arch Coal Inc. paid its top executives more … Read more
The market is pounding yet another nail into King Coal’s coffin. Peabody Energy, which touts itself as the world’s largest private sector coal company, announced yesterday morning that it is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. The company skipped two bond payments totaling $71 million, triggering a 30-day grace period before the company goes into default. And in … Read more
At this point, we should be accustomed to hearing bad news from the coal industry. What else but bad news can you expect from a sector that’s seen nearly 50 bankruptcies since 2012? But today’s announcements by Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal company, really pushed bad news to new limits. Peabody revealed that it had … Read more
In case you missed the news, Arch Coal, North America’s second largest coal company, filed for bankruptcy a few weeks back. Arch’s management hopes to use bankruptcy protection to shed $4.5 billion in debt—money that Arch borrowed from investors near the peak of the coal market but that the company can’t pay back now that coal prices have tumbled. To anyone paying … Read more
I spend so much time immersed in the minutiae of coal markets that I forget that most people—the normal ones, I mean—pay almost no attention to trends in the global coal industry. There’s no shame in that, obviously. Still, based on conversations I had with friends and family over the holidays, it’s clear that lots of people have some … Read more
Coal export terminals in British Columbia suffered two big blows last week. The first blow came from tar sands giant Suncor, which announced that it would halt shipments of petroleum coke, or “petcoke,” through the Ridley terminal on the northern coast of the province. The petcoke shipped through Ridley is a tar sands byproduct that’s “like coal, … Read more
There’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about the struggles of the US coal industry. Since last spring, US coal companies have declared bankruptcy right and left, with others, such as Arch Coal, now teetering on the brink of insolvency. But even though 2015 has been a particularly bad year for Big Coal, the industry’s … Read more
