The Sierra Club, Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards and Appalachian Voices say A&G Coal Company has violated an agreement to reclaim three coal mines in Southwest Virginia.
Environmental groups have asked a federal court to hold one of Gov. Jim Justice’s coal companies in contempt.
The Sierra Club, Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards and Appalachian Voices say A&G Coal Company has violated an agreement to reclaim three coal mines in southwest Virginia.
Further, the groups say Roanoke-based A&G has mined coal at two of the sites, in violation of a January 2023 consent decree in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia.
The reclamation deadlines have already passed for two of the sites and another looms for the third, totaling 3,300 acres in Wise County, Virginia near the Kentucky border.
A Virginia study earlier this year found A&G’s total reclamation liabilities at all of its mines total $190 million, far exceeding the $13 million available in the state’s bond pool.
Justice-owned coal companies face liabilities in numerous other jurisdictions.
Curtis Tate spoke with the company’s CEO, Sanjiv Malhotra, about those batteries and what made West Virginia a good fit.
With millions of dollars in federal support, Sparkz will soon begin building lithium batteries for energy storage and electric vehicles at a shuttered glass factory in Bridgeport.
Curtis Tate spoke with the company’s CEO, Sanjiv Malhotra, about those batteries and what made West Virginia a good fit.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tate: Describe the chemistry of the lithium batteries you’ll build. What are the advantages over nickel and cobalt?
Malhotra: So the other chemistry within lithium ion batteries is lithium iron phosphate, or in short, it’s called LFP, and that is the chemistry that Sparkz is focused on. It’s very stable, very safe. Much. Safer than (Nickel Manganese Cobalt) and much lower cost than NMC. So this is much lower cost, almost about 40 percent lower in cost, and the life of the battery itself is about three to four times that of the NMC. LFP is about 5,000 cycles, whereas NMC is about 1,500 cycles. So all these advantages, you know, make LFP very attractive. The only challenge LFP has compared to NMC is the energy density, but we are addressing that by being able to provide ultra-fast charging. LFP, that’s our proprietary technology. That means ultra-fast charging means we can charge from zero to 100 percent in 15 to 20 minutes.
This is the catalyst to make the (electric vehicle) market transition from the early adopter market, which was crazy after energy density or after range, because range and energy density are a function of each other. But as you transition to the mass market, it’s not so much about range as it is about cost and charging time. Not everyone has access to chargers. So if you’re going to a public charging station, the faster you charge, then others can charge.
Tate: Why West Virginia?
Malhotra: Affordability of utilities, both power and water, and availability of land and accessibility. West Virginia essentially is accessible by Tennessee, the area where a lot of the electric vehicle manufacturers are located or are locating. Again, the same with Michigan, the same with Ohio. The most important, Curtis, is that the workforce is a very well trained workforce in safety, and safety plays a major role in battery manufacturing, because if the safety is compromised, you’re compromising the output of the battery, and that can be fairly hazardous. West Virginia, or essentially the coal sector, provides a lot of very well trained workforce. And two things, one is safety, the safety discipline, and second is process oriented. And those are the two key things when we look at manufacturing, this is you’re essentially producing a chemical. And this workforce is heavily trained, the workforce in West Virginia to produce chemicals. So that’s why West Virginia.
Tate: Will displaced mine and power plant workers be hired for these positions?
Malhotra: Yes, because you know it, I know it, Curtis, that the coal sector has, over the years, over the last couple of decades, diminished immensely in production, and that has resulted in several hundred, maybe thousands, of mine workers being displaced. So our intent is to bring folks from there. But there are others also, l not too far from where we are, in Morgantown, there is the (Mylan) pharmaceutical plant, which shut down. Shutting down that factory also resulted in (job losses for) very well trained workers, again, workers trained in the safety discipline and process. Our pharmaceutical industry is again a very similar industry to ours. So we will have a pick of the best from the coal community, as well as from Mylan.
Tate: There’s an election coming up. Are you concerned that a change in the White House could curb some of the clean energy investments that have helped you stand up your plant?
Malhotra: What I have heard from basically both the candidates is the same that this shall continue. Batteries are not just needed for electric vehicles. Batteries are needed for energy storage. The growth in the data center market is so significant I can’t even put a number to it, and there’s a huge delta in what our grid can supply for the data center market, especially with the growth in AI. If you look at Northern Virginia, that’s where the data center belt is happening, and data centers are happening in West Virginia as well.
So with utilities like Dominion and few others just racing ahead with basically locking up energy storage or batteries for the next five, 10, 15 years. So there’s a huge demand that we cannot even fathom at this point for energy storage. And if we lose this opportunity to manufacture and manufacture across the value chain, not just the complete battery, but across the value chain, the material for lithium batteries, the cells and the battery pack. We need to have that manufacturing set up in the United States in the next five, six, seven years, because if we miss the train, I think we are going to be losing out on whether it is electric mobility, whether it is renewables, whether it is the need for satisfying the power that data as we grow in digitalization.
A document filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia shows that attorneys for the PSC’s commissioners intend to seek a motion to dismiss the case.
A federal lawsuit by the Sierra Club against the West Virginia Public Service Commission likely won’t go to trial for another year.
A document filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia shows that attorneys for the PSC’s commissioners intend to seek a motion to dismiss the case.
Should the case proceed, a trial will not take place until November 2025, the document shows.
The Sierra Club’s lawsuit challenges the PSC’s efforts to protect the dominance of coal in the state’s energy portfolio. West Virginia gets 89 percent of its electricity from coal, more than any other state.
Courtland is appealing a late September decision by U.S. District Judge John T. Copenhaver Jr. to impose a $200,000 civil penalty against Union Carbide for violating the Clean Water Act.
A real-estate company has appealed a federal judge’s ruling in a case against Union Carbide.
The Courtland Company, which owns property in South Charleston adjacent to a closed Union Carbide landfill, filed an appeal Friday with the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia.
Instead, Copenhaver allowed Union Carbide to continue with a voluntary remediation of the site it had initiated with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.
In a statement, Union Carbide said the company “is confident the court correctly rejected The Courtland Company, Inc.’s demands for excessive penalties and excessive remedial efforts.” It added that the Filmont remediation work continues.
The appeal continues a legal saga that began in 2018 when Courtland first sued Union Carbide.
The Fourth Circuit is regarded as more sympathetic to environmental concerns than other courts. It struck down multiple permits for the contested Mountain Valley Pipeline before Congress removed those cases from its jurisdiction.
Copenhaver, 99, is one of the last sitting federal judges appointed by President Gerald Ford.
Robert Garcia was standing inside a corrugated metal garage on the edge of the nation’s newest national park as long-needed rain fell outside, having just returned from a mostly-contained fire site.
A week before, New River Gorge had seen an early start to fire season on Sept. 12. The flames on Beury Mountain were in a remote and steep area of the park.
When the fire started, Garcia had been over 1,500 miles away, at his Bureau of Land Management crew’s home base of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Then came a call for help that closer crews couldn’t answer.
“It’s just a phone call saying, ‘Hey, we got picked up. We’re gonna be headed over,” Garcia remembered.
Six firefighters who comprise what’s called “severity detail” then took a three-day cross-country road trip from New Mexico to the Appalachians in their mountain-specialized type six fire engine, joining the home crew of firefighters at New River Gorge in the midst of a tense fire season.
In federal lands like the New River Gorge, firefighters are part of a national response force, with crews shared between several federal organizations and coordinated through the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). When the Beury Mountain Fire started, New River Gorge’s home crew was deployed to fight it, leaving a vulnerable region of mountains suffering from drought unprotected if another blaze broke out.
While the West has seen larger, more frequent, and more destructive fires, West Virginia is part of a tightly populated Appalachian range experiencing an increasing number of droughts and fires. In the wake of the Steep Valley fire that burned over 2,200 acres around New River Gorge last November — a fire that saw an influx of several out-of-state crews — the future of fire seasons in the park places West Virginia in the middle of a tightly-stretched web of federal resources.
The ‘Fire Bug’
Along the edge of a wall in the cache that divides indoor workout equipment from a computer desk, patches are stacked from floor to ceiling with embroidered labels from Texas to Canada.
“Our people travel all over the country, and people will come here, and they’ll leave their patches here,” Thomas Fielden, a Fire Management Officer for the NPS Allegheny Zone, explained as he gave a tour of the cache’s equipment.
At New River Gorge, that equipment includes leaf blowers — a staple of establishing fire lines in leafy Eastern woodlands that Fielden said often surprises Western firefighters — and red bags — packed with supplies like sleeping bags and ready-to-eat meals for indeterminate assignments to fight wildfires in the field.
The cache’s store of leaf blowers
When wildfire firefighters join any federal force, they receive “red card” training, standardized across the country. This shared training is what allows firefighters like Garcia to quickly arrive on a wildfire scene and enter a dangerous firefighting situation — often in an entirely new ecosystem and with an entirely new team — with certain organizational and safety procedures shared between crews.
Field weather recording equipmentFirefighting gear bagFaherty in a weighted training vest
Garcia said his first assignment after training was Virginia. And while he’s more used to Ponderosa stands or grasslands than acres of volatile hickories and oaks, each ecosystem is varied, with local challenges. The commonality is the firefighting force itself, a community he called “an incredibly small world.”
“It’s sort of like a bug that kind of bites you, and there’s nothing else really like this,” Garcia said, describing the beginning of his firefighting career. “There’s a lot of trust and sort of a brotherhood that comes in here. And back to the safety aspect of it, you start considering your life and well-being, and you have to put that in another person’s hand, just as they’re going to do that for you.”
Rebecca McDade, a seasonal employee with the New River Gorge crew, also described the “bug bite for fire” amid a “mutual learning environment.” With the variety of different firefighting backgrounds and levels of experience, different crew members are on alert for different hazards and opportunities.
“This is the first time that I’ve worked with folks from New Mexico, and as with any other resources that we’ve had come to help us at the park, they’ve all had some special insights and unique advice,” McDade said. “And it’s interesting to see, when you have resources of different backgrounds and different skill sets working together, they all have something unique to offer.”
There is a Western concentration in the federal force in the West. Fielden himself started firefighting out West before moving East to live closer to his wife’s family. He explained the NPS often trains people from entry-level positions to full staff federal firefighters, a career route that allows for travel and job security. But recruitment has been gearing up nationwide, with the Appalachian Conservation Corps launching specific campaigns to recruit women and veterans.
For Garcia and McDade, their jobs have opened opportunities not just for community but for travel. Garcia, in his first year as a firefighter, said the New River Gorge assignment marked his first time in a national park. McDade said the lure of travel was part of what drew her to return for her second season.
“I’m not sure how much traveling I would have gotten in if it wasn’t for this job,” McDade said, describing her assignments that ranged from Colorado to Texas last season. “It’s not just, ‘What do I need to know for the job?’ You also get to experience more outside of just wherever you might work otherwise.”
West Virginia In The National Fire Landscape
The NIFC has pooled national resources under various names and scopes from its Boise, Idaho headquarters since 1965. However, a turning point for national firefighting came with the 2000 National Fire Plan. After a record-breaking series of fire seasons, the national Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior released the National Fire Plan that August. Their guidance outlined how the national firefighting force needed more funding and efficiencies in resources to fight high-risk fires, with increasing populations in fire prone areas, especially in the West.
“Many western forests and rangelands provide a backdrop for this population movement,” the NFP read. “Prior to European settlement, these areas frequently experienced low, slow-burning fire. Decades of aggressive fire suppression, combined with rural residential development, have drastically changed the look of western forests and rangelands and the way fires behave.”
Without enough funding, even with increased permanent hiring to sustain sufficient firefighting crews in all areas that could need them come fire season, the report outlined a system which Fielden says prioritized keeping crews at high-alert, the most efficient way to use resources, spread out and managed by moving resources across the country to address fires.
“All of that helped, but we’re still having large fires, and they’re getting harder to contain,” Fielden said.
With worsening fires, the same two federal departments intermittently update the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy, which Fielden said has meant “moving firefighters across the country more and more to fill in those gaps” within the last decade.
Shane McDonald, the US Fish and Wildlife Service representative at the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group for the NIFC, said the NIFC is designed to handle the load of moving firefighting resources.
“The fires become larger and grow quicker and burn hotter,” McDonald said. “But forever, even before current days, times, every [NIFC] agency that we talked about earlier, they don’t have enough funding to have all the assets on site all the time to successfully extinguish and manage every fire that pops up within their jurisdiction.”
McDonald said it’s common for firefighters to travel anywhere from Alaska to New Zealand. But this year has been a period when “resources get stretched pretty thin,” McDonald said, meaning that while the NIFC has enough resources to address wildfires, responding to those fires has required “additional logistic support.”
“We have enough assets to tackle any fire that pops up and then on the appeal, preparedness level five, upper end of the scale, like we’re currently in, we have to really be thoughtful and mindful of how resources are prioritized to certain geographic areas,” McDonald said.
The Appalachains have long-seen settlements into and around mountainous areas that make firefighting difficult – with various industrial and climate changes accompanying those settlements.
“In West Virginia and across Appalachia in general, fire history is a human story,” Concord University Professor of Geography Thomas Saladyga said.
Saladyga has studied the New River Gorge for years, research that has intersected with the history of people living, mining, and leaving West Virginia’s mountains.
“Data in our recent paper indicate that fire activity in pine woodlands peaked during the 1920s-1940s and declined rapidly after the closure of mines in the 1950s and loss of population in subsequent decades,” Saladyga wrote in an Oct. 3 email to WVPB in reference to a 2024 study, published in collaboration with a NPS scientist. “So, while the last few years are concerning with regard to wildfire, the broader picture is that fire activity during the federal management era (since 1978) has been nowhere near what it was during the early 20th century or even late 19th century.”
Those last few years have seen both drought and spiking visitation to New River Gorge since shifting from a national river to a national park designation in 2021. In 2023, visitation to New River Gorge National Park and Preserve reached 1,709,623 people, according to NPS numbers. That means the number of people who visited New River Gorge in 2023 is approximately equal to the total population of West Virginia.
All of those changes mean the state is entering a firefighting scene that is working to adapt those resources to a different local fire culture and awareness.
NPS Interpretation Officer Dave Bieri said images of firefighters with drip torches – handheld canisters that drop diesel and gasoline, sometimes also used to establish fire lines – posted to the park’s social media often spur public misinterpretation. Amid calls for firefighting resources, public comments will ask why firefighters are worsening fires. But controlled burns mimic indigenous practices for years before European settlement of the Appalachains, after which colonial fire suppression has left vegetation build-up ripe for wide-scale, destructive fire.
Michelle Faherty is a fuels specialist at the park, leading a growing program for year-round fire preparation and management through clearing vegetation that fuels fires. Firefighters will either clear vegetation through mechanical thinning, more common around historic structures the NPS protects as part of its mission of cultural history preservation, or through controlled burns.
For example, Fielden said preemptive thinning prevented serious damage after a recent fire around the Nuttallburg historic coal mining town. It’s a year-round approach the park is looking to ramp up alongside concerted natural resource protection like treating invasive species.
“When we’re not fighting fire, we’re not just here twiddling our thumbs or cleaning our engines,” Faherty said.
Droopy Laurels, Burning Moss, And Historic Drought
“We had early coloration, starting with the leaves and just all of our laurels, they were just all droopy and folded over,” Faherty said. “So it’s definitely some of the worst conditions that I have seen since I’ve been working here.”
Faherty has worked at the park for nearly a decade. She said, typically, fires in Appalachia are fueled by surface vegetation. But the fire that prompted the call to New Mexico had burned through the “duff,” deeper levels of vegetation. Faherty said the atypical fire season is apparent throughout the park. Midway through the cache tour, Faherty pulled out a video on her phone of something she had not seen before: moss burning.
Fall fire season officially began for West Virginia in October and will extend through December, with a statewide burn ban from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fielden said that on the Keetch-Byram drought index, which ranges from 0 to 800, a reading above 325 at New River Gorge indicates fires in the region will be “difficult to contain and control.” In September, the index had reached 400 for New River Gorge. As of late October, after rainfall, New River Gorge was in the 300 or less range, and the severity detail had moved onto Michigan.
However, the firefighting resources available to New River Gorge depend on its federal management. Eastern areas of the state, where federal resources aren’t available, remain in “severe” to “exceptional” drought conditions. Instead, like most of the state, those areas depend on local and state firefighting resources — forces, including many volunteers, that have seen tightening budgets and limited resources.
Renters and homeowners have just over one week to apply for aid from the federal government over storms and flooding that struck West Virginia in early April.
Renters and homeowners have just over one week to apply for aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) over storms and flooding that struck West Virginia on April 11 and 12.
FEMA can help fund basic needs and repair projects spurred by storm damage in Boone, Hancock, Kanawha, Marshall, Ohio, Roane, Wetzel and Wood counties. The funds cannot apply to repairs already covered by insurance.
Residents of Brooke, Doddridge, Gilmer, Lincoln and Tyler counties may also be eligible for public assistance on the state or local level.
President Joe Biden approved FEMA’s disaster declaration for the storms in May, opening affected West Virginia regions to federal aid. Applications for the current round of aid to West Virginia were initially due in September, but the agency extended its deadline to Nov. 2.
This year, FEMA announced it streamlined its disaster aid application process, removing some application requirements.
West Virginia residents may also be eligible for financial support from the United States Small Business Administration (SBA). However, loan offers may be delayed “due to a lapse in congressional funding,” according to the SBA website.
Property and business owners from counties affected by the storm can apply for low-interest disaster relief loans from the SBA to offset financial losses. The deadline to apply for these loans is also Nov. 2.
Individuals seeking FEMA aid can apply online, or over the phone at 1-800-621-3362. For more information on eligibility and financial aid for the April storms, visit the agency’s website.
Individuals interested in applying for SBA loans can also do so online. For more information, residents can also contact the SBA over the phone at 1-800-659-2955, or over email at disastercustomerservice@sba.gov.
