TNM names 2024 award winners: Jack and Adam Lundin, Amparo Cornejo, and Ross Beaty
The Northern Miner has named Jack and Adam Lundin as its Persons of the Year for 2024.
Bankrupt coal producer Alpha Natural Resources is laying another 230 miners in West Virginia for the third time in a month as a result of a severe downturn in the coal industry.
The planned dismissals, reports AP, will take place at four mines and one processing plant operated by Brooks Run Mining in Braxton and Webster counties, West Virginia.
Only last week, Alpha announced the immediately layoff of 93 miners at Kingston Mining Inc. in Fayette County. In January, the miner sent 60-day layoff notices for 831 miners and dozens more support staff at eight underground mines and two processing plants in Boone and Raleigh Counties.
Alpha says all these job cuts are the result of a combination of oversupply of coal and dramatically reduced demand, which has driven down prices to “unsustainable levels,” particularly for central Appalachian coal.
The company filed for bankruptcy protection in August last year.
2 Comments
Restless Boomers
The worst part of this is that West Virginia, instead of allowing market forces to naturally rebirth its economy, continues to take deliberate actions which only make things worse. Several years ago we spent almost six weeks with WV, Wheeling and Ohio County economic development officials in an effort to locate a new business in Wheeling.
Despite all our efforts their over-educated university egghead buffoons couldn’t get their heads our of their you know what and we finally had to move on, buying a 38,500 sq ft factory in the Carolinas instead.
Now, Wheeling, Ohio County and WV economic development gurus are spending millions in scarce taxpayer dollars to relocate an Ohio healthcare provider to Wheeling’s moribund downtown area. This is of course happening just as the entire healthcare industry, which now sucks 20% of GDP, is about to be disintermediated by a tremendous technological avalanche that’s going to sweep healthcare as we know it down the drain.
Plain and simple, government is full of corrupt parasites who know nothing but how to sponge off hard working taxpayers, destroying our once vibrant economy in the process. Will West Virginians ever wake up?
Diogenes60025
Given reduced demand volumes, present prices are indeed sustainable, and indeed may fall further. Assuming a 30% share of utility burn, estimated long-run thermal coal prices are likely to stabilize at about these levels:
CAPP 1%S, 12,500 BTU: $42.00/t FOB mine
NAPP 3%S, 12,500 BTU: $45.00/t FOB mine
WKY 3%S, 12,000 BTU: $42.00/t FOB barge
ILB 3%S, 11,700 BTU: $35.00/t FOB mine
ILB 1.3%S, 10,800 BTU: $30.00/t FOB mine
PRB 8,800 BTU: $9:00/t FOB mine
PRB 8,400 BTU: $7.00/t FOB mine
Sorry guys, coal prices ARE NOT going to rise. Some producers have hundreds of millions of tons of bituminous coal ready to produce at cash costs of less than $10.00/ton. Just quit trading those high-cost old mines around amongst yourselves and get real.