Local coal on the move

By Bill Archer

BLUEFIELD — After a prolonged period of somewhat stagnant activity, the southern West Virginia/Southwest Virginia metallurgical coalfields have been showing some modest signs of life in recent weeks.

More coal trucks are active on roads in the southern coalfields, and there has been a noticeable up-tick in the number of Norfolk Southern unit trains carrying metallurgical, or steel-making coal from the region passing east through the Bluefield yards.

“We are moving more loads of export coal,” Robin Chapman of NS Corporate Communications said. “I was down at our coal pier at Lambert’s Point (Thursday) and it’s going full tilt.”

Chapman said that NS should have the figures available within the next two weeks to quantify the increase in export coal, but he noted that “export coal is definitely up,” he said.

“One interesting fact is that we are loading coal bound for China which is a first,” Chapman said. “We’re also seeing some increases in coal being shipped to European customers. Lambert’s Point is back to running 7 days a week.”

In addition to more coal moving by rail and on the roads, stockpiles at area mines including Brooks Run Mining Co., LLC’s Cucumber Mine in McDowell County have been vanishing. Ted Pile, a spokesman for Brooks Run, a subsidiary of Alpha Natural Resources, said in an email response to a question about the metallurgical coal market that met coal producers have seen “vast improvement in steel mill operating rates in this country since they bottomed out in December, and you’d expect that demand for metallurgical coal would flow from that.

“Mills also seem to be ramping up in Europe and elsewhere as the recession eases,” Pile stated in the email. “The real interesting cog in the wheel has been China, which could import 30 million tons of metallurgical coal this year compared to less than a million tons in 2008,” he wrote. “That’s well over 10 percent of the entire seaborne trade for met coal.”

Pile underscored the significance of the shipment of U.S. coal to China. “There’s even been some met coal shipped from Appalachia to China, a distant and unusual haul.” He said that all of these developments are encouraging coming into 2010, “assuming global economies don’t go back into a tailspin.”

Brooks Run’s Cucumber Mine produces coal from the Pocahontas No. 3 coal seam, the “world standard of metallurgical coal,” according to noted geologist, Marshall Miller.

– Contact Bill Archer at barcher@bdtonline.com

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