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Re: More than 2,000 Central Appalachia miners laid off-and the beating goes on and no on has the will to stop itCoal is in deep deep trouble. I wouldn't blame the president for all of it though the EPA rules certainly didn't help them. The power companies were already at the limit of what they could get away with w/regards to waste disposal and states have clamped down on them even more than the Fed has after some major spills and growing public awareness. But coal also couldn't get any capacity on the rails due to the volume of oil being shipped by rail, and natural gas prices have stayed very low. Yet another problem is that the coal mining companies in most cases cannot sweep their employee's health benefits under the rug as they become distressed. At least one tried to spin-off a bag-holding entity and coal miner's health benefits along with it and failed in the courts. To cap it off, renewables have added a few percentage points to the energy equation and while that might not seem like a lot it was enough to kill margins due to a combination of the straight percentage loss reducing demand and the lower efficiency of coal plants due to base load cycling. So lots of bad news all around, and only a bit of it can really be blamed on the EPA. The EPA makes a great punching bag for the conservative media, but nobody should be fooled... the industry has severe problems even without the new federal rules. Also please note that relative to the hundreds of thousands of people that get a job or lose a job each month, the coal industry has mostly lost jobs through automation, not regulation. Fewer and fewer people able to mine more and more coal. In anycase, I have been tracking coal names for several years now. I have NOT invested in them for real at any time nor do I intend to. There are no 'buys' here. We've already seen two significant bankruptcies and ACI and ANR are both at the forefront of the pain having lost 75-80% of their value in the last year (85%+ in the last two years), down to around $1 each, then just this month they both have lost even more with ACI dropping 40% from $1 this month and ANR dropping 20% (and dropping 35% from $1 in just the last 1.5 months). They might be the next two dominoes to fall. -Matt edit: and I will add, Appalachia coal has been non-competitive with other coal sources (such as Powder Basin coal) for a long time. If I remember right. EPA rules or not, Appalachia coal was dying on its own. |
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Msg # | Subject | Author | Recs | Date Posted |
50149 | Re: More than 2,000 Central Appalachia miners laid off-and the beating goes on and no on has the will to stop it | rlp2451 | 0 | 5/22/2015 8:09:06 PM |