How an Alabama Coal Mine Expansion Tests the Biden Administration – Mother Jones

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

An Alabama mining company is taking final steps toward a major buildout of its operations in the central part of the state. 

The expansion, which is proposed to include the mining of federally owned coal, comes in the wake of a settlement over the company’s environmental record and as its mines continue to be cited by regulators for alleged safety violations. 

The project’s fate has become a litmus test for the Biden administration, which has moved to phase out mining of federal coal in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming.

Warrior Met Coal, based in Brookwood and one of the largest producers of metallurgical coal in the United States, is nearing regulatory approval for expanded operations at its Blue Creek facilities between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, according to corporate filings.

If approved by state and federal regulators, the project would be one of the largest expansions of coal mining in Alabama in recent years, with the new facilities expected to increase Warrior Met’s production by up to 60 percent. Public financial support for the facility and its export of coal to overseas markets for use in steel-making may top $400 million. 

The project is set to use the destructive longwall mining method, where bladed machines shear coal from expanses as wide as 1,000 feet, extracting coal from an area that can extend well over a mile. The rock ceiling, called “overburden,” then collapses behind the cutting tool. When the ceiling of the mine collapses, the ground above the mine sinks, sometimes by several feet, even though it may be hundreds of feet above the mine.

This subsidence, or sinking of land, caused by longwall mining can lead to serious surface impacts, such as damage to buildings and draining of creeks and ponds, as well as increasing risks related to methane escape. Oak Grove, a small community about 25 miles southeast of Warrior Met’s expansion, has become an ominous example of those impacts, with residents outraged by closing businesses, undermined homes and a fatal home explosion atop the mine. 

Unlike the operation in nearby Oak Grove, however, Warrior Met’s expansion at Blue Creek may also include the extraction of publicly-owned coal managed by the Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency. 

In Alabama, as in many other states, so-called “mineral rights”—the right to, for example, mine for coal under one’s property—have been separated from surface ownership over time. One person or entity can own a surface property under Alabama law while another person or entity can own the rights to all of the resources below that same piece of land, a situation known as a “split estate.” In significant portions of Alabama, for example, the federal government retains mineral rights despite private land ownership on the surface. 

BLM announced in April that it would conduct an environmental assessment related to Warrior Met’s proposal to mine 14,040 acres of federal minerals underlying privately owned land in Tuscaloosa County. Warrior Met’s applications to lease the coal rights propose to extract approximately 57.5 million tons of recoverable public coal reserves, documents show.

In July, the Biden administration announced that the federal government plans to phase out coal leasing in Montana and Wyoming, a decision lauded by environmentalists and criticized by industry representatives and right-wing politicians. Now, Biden must decide whether his administration will adopt the same policy concerning federally-owned coal in Alabama. 

According to records from the Mining Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), the federal underground mine regulator, the Blue Creek facility is regularly fined for safety violations. Records show that just this year, employees of Warrior Met and their contractors inside Blue Creek No. 1 have been cited 76 times for safety violations, 22 of which were labeled “significant or substantial.” In each of these 22 cases, federal inspectors found “a reasonable likelihood the hazard…[would] result in an injury or illness of a reasonably serious nature.” The violations pertained to mining coal through private, not federal, mineral rights.

Warrior Met has…