The American West is now coal’s new home base. Production has dipped slightly in Wyoming, but the state still produces 40% of the nation’s coal – far more than any other state. As part of Inside Energy’s series on the Future of Coal, Reporter Clay Scott went to America’s current capital of coal, and found the industry’s imprint on the West runs deep.
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Traveling south of Gillette, Wyoming, through an arid and austere country once home to herds of bison, you pass coal mine after coal mine, for 70 uninterrupted miles, carving deep troughs into the prairie. Seen from a distance, the immensity of the mining activity is striking. But descend into one of these open pit mines for the first time, and it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of things.
Blasting teams set explosive charges to loosen the steep sides of what look like gigantic sunken amphitheaters. Colossal digging machines called coal shovels load hundreds of tons at a time into haul trucks three stories high
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TRACK 12: At the Eagle Butte Mine, near Gillette, J. D. Dietsche showed me the coal shovel he’s operated for Alpha Coal for a decade, seven days on, seven days off.
J. D. DIETSCHE: You drive your truck to the dirt shovel, get a load of dirt, take it to the dump, come back and do it again and again and again and again. (laughs) for 12 ½ hours. Minus your half hour lunch break. It is very, very repetitious.
The coal that’s mined each year in the Powder River Basin – 400 million tons of it - supplies power to millions of people. But while you might not have to blow the tops off mountains to get at the seams, coal mining here has still impacted the land, and the people who depend on it, in profound and far reaching ways.
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L. J. TURNER: From our perspective in here, it really seems that most of the time, we’re the only ones that don’t have the ranch for sale and hoping to sell it to the coal company.
TRACK 15: That’s L. J. Turner. His family has ranched in the southern end of the Powder River Basin since 1916.
L. J. TURNER: 0228 This is home. It’s been home for all of our lives. It’s uh…it’s going to continue to be so.
We’re standing on a low ridge at the eastern edge of L. J.’s ranch, looking out at the North Antelope – Rochelle coal mine. The mine sprawls for miles over pastures where cattle once grazed. This is – or it was – a landscape of rolling grassland, punctuated by rugged breaks where mule deer took shelter. But the contours of the land have been altered to get at the coal. By law, the coal companies are bound to “reclaim” the land when they’ve finished mining it.
L. J. TURNER: 1351 The coal miners over here whenever they first moved in and started taking our pastures, they said, oh, you just wait until we’ve reclaimed this land. It’s going to be so good you won’t believe how good it’s going to be. and that’s been…thirty years ago, maybe? And our cows have never had a mouthful of reclaimed grass. in those thirty years. 1
Of even greater concern, says L. J., is the steady drying up of local water sources in recent years, which he attributes to coal mining.
L. J. TURNER: Are they going to be able to reclaim these aquifers and the creeks? because I don’t think they can. They say they can, but all they’re doing is talking theory. And here I’m living the practical thing.
TRACK 18: In western Montana, at his home along the Bitterroot River, I met Bill Ritchie. Over more than 20 years he managed several mines in the Powder River Basin.
BILL RITCHIE: 1127 There are problems. There are water problems, there are things that are hard to replace, and hard to reclaim. …Really took a lot of work, a lot of effort, and a lot of money.
TRACK 19: When Bill first started working in coal, he says, western mines were being applauded for producing a product that was much cleaner than eastern coal. But toward the end of his career, he told me, he started to reexamine some of his assumptions about coal mining.
BILL RITCHIE: We didn’t understand the impact on the atmosphere, and the greenhouse gasses. We didn’t understand mercury as well, or the problems it creates in people’s health just burning it.
Bill says the industry has been working on cleaning up coal from the time he started in the business. And they are still working on it, and not any closer to a solution. In the meantime, coal, that powerful and dirty and much debated black rock, is certain to remain a feature of the economy and landscape of the West for many years to come.
For Inside Energy, I’m Clay Scott
That story was supported by High Plains News. It’s part of a series ‘The Future of Coal’. -- a collaboration between The Allegheny Front, West Virginia Public Broadcasting, and Inside Energy.
