Prospecting for answers

PALMER — Will coal mining return to Sutton?

A meeting convened in Palmer on Tuesday took a look at that question and posed a few more. What will mining mean for the community? What stance should the community take?

Two companies have leases in the area and may be looking to dig up coal for export. And the community is trying to figure out where it stands.

“I think it’s a pretty split 50-50 opinion around here right now,” said Rebecca Hobbs at the Sutton General Store.

She said that in Sutton there are folks who want to see the jobs mining would create and those who worry about the environment. Farther up the road in Chickaloon, she said, opinion leans more to the anti-mining side.

Tim Leach, a longtime coal watcher vocal during the debate over building a coal-fired power plant in the Valley, has been busy this week in a new role — organizing speaking events billed as the Alaska Coal Workshop Series.

Reached by phone on his way to Seward, Leach said he’s not heading up any kind of anti-coal group. He simply wants to get the discussion going.

Toward that, he brought up two presenters — Judy Bonds, co-director of the Coal River Mountain Watch, and Joe Lovett, executive director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy.

Both live and work in Appalachia and spoke mostly of the devastation their communities have seen.

“We’ve been mining coal in West Virginia for 140 years but we’re the poorest state in the Union and we have been,” Bonds said in an interview.

She cited health problems, polluted streams and the destruction of whole mountains as other products of coal mining.

“You’re different from us. We have coal power plants built that need our coal and people that depend on power plants,” Lovett said. “What Alaska would be doing is far more troublesome. You would be mining this coal to ship it to Asia where it would be burned.”

And pollution from Asia, he said, would end up melting Alaska’s glaciers and dumping pollutants in its rivers.

Two companies have leases in the area. One, an outfit out of Australia by the name of Black Range Minerals, has bought the lease to the old Jonesville mine. Black Range estimates there is still 130 million tons of coal to be had. The company’s Web site, blackrangeminerals.com, outlines the project and cites Asia as a potential market.

The other company is Usibelli Coal Mine, which currently runs a mine in Healy. Usibelli owns the lease to Wishbone Hill.

Bill Brophy, the company’s vice president of Consumer Relations said his company has no plans currently to mine that coal. There’s no equipment up there, no operations under way. But they are working on some permitting.

“Do we want to study and look at that resources as a potential? Absolutely,” Brophy said. “But have we found a market for it yet? Our vice president of sales and research continues to look for a market.”

Without a new market, he said, there would be no reason to open up a new mine. The company’s current site in Healy has “hundreds of years of coal” left in it, he said.

As for environmental concerns, Brophy urged anyone worried about environmental damage to simply look at the company’s track record and visit its Web site, usibelli.com.

In Healy, mining operations move sideways — the topsoil from a new pit is used to cover up an old one. The company seeds the area with fast-growing plants that eventually are overwhelmed by Alaska species. And they re-tree the area with saplings grown from seeds school children gather.

Five to 10 years later, looking at the land, Brophy said, “You can just barely tell that it was disturbed.”

On this point Lovett, at least, was emphatic.

“It’s the big lie in coal mining that reclamation works,” he said. The resultant landscape, he said, bears no resemblance to what it was. “I see no reason it’s going to be different here.”

But Brophy does.

“The West Virginia mining operation and ours are totally different,” he said. “Our business is very sensitive to the environment.”

Leach said a lot of the discussion, at least in the Palmer leg of the speaking tour, seemed to focus on some sort of Alaska exceptionalism.

“Hey, we’re Alaskans and we don’t need to be told what to do,” is how he summed up the opinion.

But, he said, the point of bringing up the two speakers was to learn from other communities what they’ve gone through.

“We need to look toward communities that have been impacted to gain their insights,” he said.

If it’s jobs and development people want, he said, they should look at all the options out there.

“It’s a finite resource,” he said of coal and other fossil fuels. “I think we have better options that are more long-term and more sustainable.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.