A Leslie County miner has died, according to state officials. 29-year old Travis Glen Brock was killed when a pillar of coal and rock gave way in Bledsoe Coal Company’s Abner Branch mine. He was the first mining fatality of 2010 in Kentucky. Bledsoe Coal is a subsidiary of James River Coal, based in Richmond, Virginia.

Appalachian states are looking at a decline in coal output over the next ten years, and they should start planning for that now. That’s the message from a West Virginia consulting group, according to the Associated Press. Downstream Strategies, a group based in Morgantown, projects coal production will drop by 50 percent in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The report listed several reasons for this. One is other sources of cheap coal, including Wyoming, Indonesia, and South America. Another is competition from other fuels, especially natural gas. And a third is that most of the easy coal is gone and what remains is hard to mine and subject to stricter environmental regulation. The moral, says the report, is that mountain states should be setting up now to diversify the economy and support other sources of jobs. The report especially recommends green energy projects.
Coal production in Central Appalachia peaked in 1997 at 290 million tons. It’s been declining since, and was down to 235 million in 2008. The Department of Energy projects it will keep declining, even without any effect from government regulations or climate change legislation. This was, indeed, predicted in several geological reports issued ten years ago. Coalfield counties and states depend heavily on mining jobs and taxes, and if they decline, governments as well as individuals will feel the effects.

West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller hosted a roundtable discussion of black lung in Princeton, reports the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. He heard miners and physicians describe persistent barriers to getting black lung benefits. Rockefeller noted that he had heard exactly the same stories 25 years ago and called it “shocking” that so little has changed. West Virginia’s Senator Byrd got a provision included in the Senate’s health reform bill that would, if passed, make getting black lung benefits a good deal easier.

Dominion Virginia Power will keep looking for money for carbon capture, reports the Coalfield Progress. The company has said it will install carbon capture at its new Wise County power plant when the technology is commercially available. Dominion has been working with scientists at Virginia Tech and has come up with the idea to inject carbon dioxide into thin, unmineable coal seams. Doing this will take a lot of money, an estimated $580 million. The company applied for but didn’t get some federal stimulus money.
By the way, one of the carbon capture projects that did get stimulus money is not as complete as news reports have indicated. AEP’s Mountaineer steam plant on the Ohio River in West Virginia has a small demonstration carbon capture operation now in place, and just got $334 million more to expand it. Reports have implied that, with the money, AEP will be able to capture and store 90% of the CO2 from the plant. Not so, according to the Coalfield. The planned facility will take 90% of the CO2 from a single flue covering about 20% of the plant’s total output.

There are signs that elements within the Obama administration don’t agree on how to treat coal ash and other waste from power plants, reports the Wall Street Journal. The EPA is moving towards classifying coal ash as a toxic waste. But the Office of Management and Budget gets to review all proposed regulations, and there are signs that OMB is objecting. This comes after an OMB official, Cass Sunstein, has held nearly 20 meetings with industry groups to discuss the effect of such a rule. If coal ash is officially declared a toxic substance, there will be a lot of work to do. The nation’s power plants produce enough of it each year to fill a million rail cars.

Blair Mountain is no longer historic. That’s the official word from the US Department of the Interior, as reported in the Charleston Gazette. The National Park Service announced on January 8 that it has removed Blair Mountain from the National Register of Historic Places. The mountain was the site of a pitched battle between 10,000 union miners and sheriffs’ deputies and company guards in 1921, an event that many consider an important event in the region’s history. Some historians call it the largest armed uprising in this country since the Civil War. The mountain was listed as historic in March of last year. But Massey Energy had plans to strip mine the mountain and has joined opponents of the listing. An area can’t be listed as “historic” without consent of a majority of the landowners. The Park Service says that as of now, 30 of 57 landowners have objected, and so the historic listing has de-listed.