Tag: Ohio Valley Resource

On Thursday — Earth Day — President Joe Biden announced an ambitious goal to fight the climate crisis: The country will cut by half its global warming emissions by 2030. Such action will require a massive reduction in the use of fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, long a bedrock of the economy for Ohio Valley and Appalachian communities, and some regional politicians have already voiced opposition to the president’s plan.

But Biden’s Energy Secretary, former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, said in an interview with the Ohio Valley ReSource that the region could gain jobs as a result of action against climate change.

“I don’t mean to be a Pollyanna, I understand this issue of transitioning is hard,” she said, “but I want to give people hope that this administration is really interested in helping to lure businesses, and diversify existing businesses that are there to be able to take advantage of what is going to be a massive market opportunity if we do this right.”

To support that point, the Department of Energy announced nearly $110 million for projects intended to keep or create jobs in energy communities, and an interagency working group released a report that identified nearly $38 billion in existing federal funding that energy communities can use.

The existing funding available includes a wide range of support, from infrastructure improvements to the repair of damaged mine lands. The working group report also prioritizes the communities that should be the focus of assistance based on the concentration of vulnerable jobs associated with fossil fuels. Central Appalachia and western Kentucky rank highly on those measures.

Granholm said the Biden administration’s $2 trillion American Jobs Plan includes directives that would steer a significant amount of the funding to such vulnerable communities.

“And obviously, coal and fossil communities are at the top of the list,” she said.

The newly announced DOE funding includes: $75 million for carbon capture projects, intended to remove CO2 emissions from power plants and industrial facilities; $19.5 million for “critical mineral extraction” from the waste from burning and mining coal; and $15 million for two geothermal energy research projects at West Virginia University, in cooperation with Sandia National Laboratories.

Granholm said West Virginia could be a geothermal “hot spot,” and the research could yield valuable information about how to tap that energy. The critical minerals research will focus on scarce elements important for manufacturing batteries and electronics, many of which are now imported. Initial research shows that coal waste products could contain enough of these minerals to make harvesting them worthwhile.

Carbon capture and storage has long been an elusive goal for the Energy Department, which invested heavily in research projects such as the ill-fated FutureGen facility, which aimed to strip CO2 from coal power plant emissions. The project was canceled, and similar efforts to apply the technology to commercial facilities have also failed.

Granholm defended the continued spending on the technology, and said that the emissions reduction goal the president has set will provide the incentive to make it work.

“When the president announces that we’re going to reduce by half our CO2 emissions by 2030, people should see that that’s a market signal that we’re going to need these products to be able to achieve those goals,” she said. “And you’d better believe that there are businesses who are eager to capitalize on that demand.”

Granholm also announced that the current leader of an Energy Department laboratory has been appointed to lead the administration’s work group tasked with assisting coal and power plant communities. Brian Anderson, a West Virginia resident, directs the National Energy Technology Laboratory, based jointly in Morgantown, West Virginia, and in Pittsburgh.

The West Virginia focus of the Energy Department’s announcement and funding could be construed — in purely political terms — as an offering to the state’s Democratic Senator, Joe Manchin. Manchin, a centrist with strong coal industry and labor connections, is a critical vote Biden will need in the evenly divided Senate.

Granholm said she sought Manchin’s input in crafting the report.

“Joe Manchin and I have certainly had many conversations about this,” she said. “He’s an ally in this fight, he wants to make sure that coal miners are not left behind.”

On the same day that Biden convened a virtual climate summit with world leaders, Manchin conducted a hearing on carbon capture technology in the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which he chairs.

Republican Congressional leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, criticized Biden’s climate goal as both harmful to the domestic energy industry and futile in the face of global emissions.

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, immediately announced his opposition to what he called Biden’s “radical, transformational and too-rapid reductions.” Morrisey hinted at the possibility of a lawsuit.

“Notably missing from President Biden’s proposal is any discussion of the legal basis for his new, unilateral mandate,” he said.

Morrisey earlier led a successful legal challenge against President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

United Mine Workers of America President Cecil Roberts said he’s been hearing the term “just transition” tossed around for more than 20 years as part of the long-running, nearly Sisyphean discussion about climate change, clean energy, and coal country. Simply put: he’s not a fan.

“I ask anybody who has been uttering those two words over the last 30 years — point to one, one ‘just transition’ in this country,” Roberts challenged. “And you can’t.”

The West Virginia native is the UMWA’s second-longest serving leader, behind only the legendary John L. Lewis. But unlike Lewis, who served during the coal industry and union’s height of power and influence, Roberts’ tenure coincides with an epic decline in coal production and employment in the U.S., and now, what could be the closing chapter for coal.

Coal employment has dropped by more than half in the past decade. More than 60 mining companies have declared bankruptcy, coal-fired power power plants are closing ahead of schedule, and the number of hourly coal workers is now at the lowest point since the government began tracking such numbers.

Now, a Democratic president who has organized labor’s support is pressing ahead with an ambitious clean energy agenda to combat climate change. At a “climate change summit” this week, timed to coincide with Earth Day, President Joe Biden is expected to announce a goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. Roberts fears that could bring an end to the remaining 44,100 or so coal mining jobs.

The administration has pledged to invest in coal communities as it reduces fossil fuel dependence. “We have to act on climate change,” White House Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy pledged in a March interview with the Ohio Valley ReSource, “but we also have to act to make sure that there’s no worker and no community left behind.”

Roberts is not persuaded.

“It’s one thing to want these things to happen, but it’s another thing for those things to materialize,” he said. “People in Appalachia believe that there’ll be the second coming of the Lord before they see a ‘just transition,’” he said.

So Roberts is using the leverage he has — including a close relationship with his fellow West Virginian, Sen. Joe Manchin — in order to sway Biden’s policies to allow room for coal and win support for coal communities.

In a joint appearance with Manchin on Monday, Roberts laid out broad principles that he thinks should be included in the administration’s climate and energy policy, including robust support for the controversial technology known as carbon capture and sequestration, targeted tax credits and loans for coal country jobs, and additional support for displaced miners.

In a broad-ranging interview with the ReSource, Roberts made clear that he is not a climate change denier or skeptic, and he supports many of Biden’s plans for infrastructure and renewable energy. But Roberts also made clear that coal communities in Appalachia have sacrificed enough.

“I think it would be a travesty, and we won’t support the elimination of the jobs that we still have,” he said.

His union’s stance, coupled with Manchin’s position as the potentially decisive vote in the evenly divided Senate, could become a challenge for the Biden administration’s attempt to act on the climate crisis.

Technological Gamble

“People might say, well, the UMWA is being awfully bold here proposing ideas to the president of the United States,” Roberts said. “But I don’t think it’s all that bold given the fact that there’s a long record here of sacrifice from coal miners in this nation, whether it’s the number of miners that’ve been killed, or the number of miners that have died from black lung, just to make this country great. There’s just no other group of workers that have contributed that much to this nation’s economy.”

Roberts is resting his argument, in part, on the historic price that miners, their communities, land, and water have paid in order to power the country. He matches that regional history with a global argument about the nature of climate change: ending coal use and its carbon emissions in the U.S. will mean little if international appetite for coal and its emissions continue apace.

While the coal industry is collapsing in the U.S., coal shows little signs of slowing in other parts of the world, especially China. A recent projection from the International Energy Agency, for example, shows a 4% increase in China’s coal consumption is likely this year, pushing CO2 emissions upward as the pandemic pause in electricity demand lifts.

This is where Roberts makes a pitch for a technology that many people in the climate change debate have given up on: carbon capture and storage, or CCS.

CCS uses advanced chemistry to strip the CO2 from the smokestacks of a power plant or manufacturing facility, then stores it in the earth — at least, theoretically. The technology, sometimes called “clean coal” by industry boosters, has been a talking point for decades, and the federal government has put hundreds of millions into its research and development. But there have been very few commercial scale applications, largely due to the prohibitive costs.

Roberts cites United Nations reports that encourage further development of CCS, and the past support for the technology from President Biden’s former boss.

“I can shut my eyes and still see Senator Barack Obama, campaigning for the presidency of the United States in Lebanon, Virginia,” Roberts said. He recalled speaking to a packed house just before Obama, who badly wanted to win over enough voters in the western coal counties of Virginia to win the swing state.

“So he knows he’s in coal country, and he knows that people are worried about their future. And he makes a great speech. And he says, ‘if we can find a way to put a man on the moon, we can find a way to burn coal cleanly,’” Roberts recalled. “And here’s the reality of the situation. Does anybody really believe that it’s impossible to find a way to burn coal cleanly? We can, we just haven’t decided that it’s worth the investment.”

The UMWA’s position paper asks to “significantly enhance” funding for CCS with a goal of a “utility-scale coal-fired” project by 2030. It also recommends 5-year waivers from any zero-carbon mandates for “coal-fired utility units that commit to installing CCS.”

Coal Community Support

The UMWA is also calling for more support for miners who have lost jobs and more ways to grow new jobs in coal-dependent communities.

That includes full funding of the federal Abandoned Mine Lands reclamation program, something the Biden administration has identified as a potential jobs generator, and provisions that the associated jobs will have a prevailing wage standard.

The union also wants a “significant” expansion of tax incentives for “renewable supply-chain

manufacturing” in coal areas, with hiring preference given to dislocated miners and their families.

Roberts said he’s not against renewable energy, but he is bothered by the low wages and imported goods often associated with wind and solar power.

“Right now, almost all these renewable energy jobs don’t pay enough to support a family,” he said. “They are nowhere near the wages that a coal miner makes.”

In their (virtual) joint appearance Monday at the National Press Club both Roberts and Manchin said renewable energy incentives should be targeted to coal states and other fossil fuel producing regions to make up for the anticipated losses from an aggressive clean energy policy. And both criticized the renewable industry’s dependence on importing cheaper parts from China.

We’re propping up their economy with some of the things that we have done here,” Roberts said. “So let’s produce those wind turbines here. Let’s produce those solar panels here. Let’s make them good union jobs while we’re at it. By the way, that’s not too outrageous, because it’s a part of Biden’s plan.”

Elaine Tanner lives with her life partner, Jimmy Hall, at the head of Mill Creek in Letcher County, Kentucky. Jimmy is a sixth-generation Letcher Countian, and the land is his family land. Together, they like to roll around on their property on their ATV. But lately, Tanner’s spent more time searching for signs of damage than having fun. That’s what she was doing on Thursday morning — investigating her mountain.

“A few days ago,” she said, “the rains came and the mountain busted open.”

After the March 28 rainstorm, Tanner was dismayed to find the hillside looking even less stable than usual. Boulders had shifted downslope. Trees were leaning, she said, almost like they were drunk. Even though the head of the hollow is too high to flood, Tanner, like many who live on higher ground, found herself facing another problem: landslides.

In 2020, parts of the coal surface mine above their residence blew out — an event when flooding causes water pressure to overcome a mine barrier, forcing earth, water and rock down a mountain. Though no one was hurt, Tanner believes the worst may be yet to come. “When the ponds fill up and saturate that bench,” she said, pointing to the crest of the hill, “the bench is gonna drop.”

The bench is the narrow ledge cut into the mountainside, which a mining company uses to access the mine. Mudflows from its churned-up surface have gummed up the creek, turning it a color Tanner likens to a “dirty milkshake.” The ponds work to control runoff, and fill with water when it rains.

This is just the latest in what Tanner says is a years-long litany of land stability problems that she alleges go back to a coal company called Deane Mining. Now a subsidiary of Quest Energy, the company acquired a permit above Tanner’s house originally belonging to the CONSOL coal company. Ever since, parts of the mountain have been slipping, she said, some quickly and some slowly. (The company did not respond to a request for comment by the time of deadline for this story.)

Parts of the hillside have already fallen, luckily far from Tanner’s house. But when she closes her eyes, she imagines she can hear the trees creaking their way towards her house.

“I have many restless nights here,” she said. “There’s no predicting what this will do.”

Tanner’s worry may be warranted. Climate change has been shown to increase the frequency and intensity of rainfall throughout the Ohio Valley, and major flooding events have now disrupted eastern Kentucky communities twice in the span of a month. In each case, the immediate aftermath involved cleanup from not only extensive water damage, but fallen rocks and dirt. While insurance, or federal disaster assistance, may cover the cost of damage to a flooded home, victims of landslides often have no such recourse, leaving them limited options.

Clear and Present Risk

“East Kentucky is a naturally landslide susceptible part of the world,” Matthew Crawford said.

Crawford, who works for the Kentucky Geological Survey, says landslides can take many forms and many names: Mudflows, rockslides, slips, creeps. Each one takes on a different character depending on where it happens, and what it hits. In fact, rockfalls and landslides cost the state $4 million annually, and that’s with a large number going unreported. Eastern Kentucky leads the state in landslides. In eastern Kentucky, nearly everyone is vulnerable, because in much of the area, there’s nowhere to build but the floodplain and the mountainside.

Heavy rains add to the risk, Crawford said. He recently completed a study of landslide risk in five counties in eastern Kentucky, which he hopes will help local officials prepare for the worst. Currently, he says, there just isn’t enough data, especially when it comes to correlating rainfall with landslide risk. Because of that, the problem hits hardest at home — because very few insurance companies will cover damage that is both rare and catastrophic.

“When you have that, I guess it’s hard for insurance actuaries to come up with risk maps,” he said.

There are a few options for landowners, and all of them take time, energy, and the willingness to navigate bureaucracy.

If a mining causes a landslide, and the mine is old enough to be covered by the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, it’s possible to ask the state’s Division of Abandoned Mine Lands to inspect the property. If the mine is determined as the cause of the incident, AML will do what they can to reduce the problem, and a property owner may try to sue to recover damages or force repairs.

For other incidents, there’s often only one other option, called a Hazard Mitigation Grant. Complex and time-consuming, this route requires coordination between local officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as voluntary participation from impacted residents. The process can take years.

One community in the town of Evarts, deep in Harlan County, Kentucky, has been going through the process since a 2015 snowstorm caused a mountainside to collapse onto a cluster of homes. The residents were all renters, and after trying, unsuccessfully, to contact their landlord, Harlan County opted to go the federal route. The grant will pay residents to move, but does not help them find housing. According to Harlan County Emergency Management Director David McGill, the county is required to claim the land as permanent green space, which means those homes can never be occupied again. “The individuals will be moving out of that area,” McGill said.

Man-Made Problem?

McGill noted that landslides are a constant risk in steep and rugged Harlan County. In late March, flooding in the area caused the usual levels of headache for residents and local officials. In one case, debris rolled off an unreclaimed mine in Harlan County, formerly owned by the Blackjewel coal company, blocking a road and causing locals to lose drinking water access.

In 2019, Blackjewel filed for bankruptcy, and this year a federal judge approved the bankruptcy, leaving over two hundred permits up for sale and many parcels of land unreclaimed. However, when asked if unreclaimed mine lands were a larger problem, McGill demurred.

Dustin White, a community organizer with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, argues that mining often contributes to landslides. “It really changes the topography of the land,” White said.

Strip mines and deep mines alike change the flow of water across the land, creating disorder in headwaters that can, given the chance, build into chaos downstream. Stripped trees and bare soil increase rain runoff, which clogs creeks with sediment. And abandoned mines, he said, are rarely watched closely.

White noted that the ecosystem has been damaged by more than just the coal industry. Gas pipeline construction, deforestation, road construction, and other forms of poorly planned land use have transformed the landscape.

When asked what many people in Central Appalachia tend to do in the event of a devastating landslide, White grew quiet for a moment, then said, “They just walk away from the place.”

Hoping to Stay

For the Mill Creek hollow, it’s a waiting game. Maybe the mud will stay above their houses; Maybe one year, when it rains, it won’t. Unless something is done, they fear, their luck might not always hold. And when it happens, who will they call?

Tanner and her partner don’t want to walk away. They have lots of dreams for their land. They have long wanted to open it to visitors as a camping or hunting ground, maybe build themselves a cabin somewhere a little up the ridge. But first, said Tanner, they need to know it is safe. She has been organizing and filing complaints against Deane Mining for many years, hoping to at least gain some measure of safety, make them pay for some native trees on the bare mountain top to hold the water in.

“This is where I want to be,” she said as she made her way back down the ridge.

She paused for a moment and looked across the narrow hollow, where her partner’s family cemetery sits nestled in a grove of pines.

“That’s where I’ll go, you know,” she noted, smiling a little. “I’d like to go there knowing I’m not going to be covered up with big rocks and mud.”

The Ohio Valley ReSource gets support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and our partner stations.