(The Associated Press circulated the following story by Carson Walker on September 11.)
BLACK THUNDER MINE, Wyo. — This vast part of Wyoming, roughly halfway between Gillette and Newcastle, bustles like a modern equivalent of the gold rush days.
But today’s mother lode isn’t shiny. It’s pitch black.
It’s clean-burning coal that electric utilities crave because it helps them obey pollution laws.
And unlike the gold mining in the nearby Black Hills of South Dakota, Powder River Basin miners use 30-story-high machines to scrape off the topsoil, blast away the coal and haul it to a crusher on the biggest Tonka-like haul trucks on the market. Then it’s loaded onto countless trains that spread out like a spider web, each extending as far as the eye can see.
Some in the coal mining industry hope the Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Railroad can find roughly $2 billion to upgrade and extend its line to Minnesota. Then this coal could be converted to electricity for users in the Midwest and East, places that went dark in the recent power outage.
The Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Union Pacific railroads are the main players, hauling the coal north and south. The DM&E wants to join the game and move the coal east.
There’s no longer a rail shortage, but the DM&E would open up new markets, says Greg Schaefer, a vice president with Arch Coal Inc., the parent company of Thunder Basin Coal Co., which runs the Black Thunder Mine.
“The Burlington Northern and Union Pacific have invested well over a billion dollars in the Powder River Basin in the last four or five years,” he says. “So they’ve eliminated a lot of their bottleneck.”
Also, more competition likely would lower transportation rates, another potential benefit, Schaefer says.
“It would be a long-term deal. We’re not factoring it into our plans at this time because it has such a long lead time. We’ve got to get our coal to market today,” he says.
Kevin Schieffer, DM&E president, expects such a low-key assessment. The Wyoming mines still have to work with the existing railroads, he says.
“The mining industry out there has been very supportive in our regulatory filings and so forth, but they’ve got a business to run today,” he says. “Until it’s coming on the boards and happening, no sense making waves with the big guys.”
The coal train project isn’t even listed in DM&E’s own long-term plan, Schieffer says. “The day this thing starts being built is going to give them three years of lead time.”
Steve Beil, engineering supervisor with Thunder Basin Coal, one of the biggest coal mining companies, says the benefits of Powder River Basin coal make it feasible, even with the cost of hauling coal from Wyoming to power plants in the East.
Among the benefits: low sulfur allows utilities to burn the coal without expensive pollution-control devices. And it’s relatively near the surface, so it’s cheaper to mine.
Despite financial, legal and regulatory hurdles still unresolved, Schieffer says he’s confident the DM&E project will succeed.