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David McDermott
Coal produced in the Western1 States has increased in price relative to coal from other regions of the Nation. At the same time, employment in coal mining has been virtually unchanged in the Western States, while it has declined in most other parts of the country. Appalachia is still the country’s largest coal producer and employer, but a clear westward shift of coal mining is underway. Much of both the increased price for western coal and the stability of employment in western coal mining results from the low sulfur content of the area’s coal, which has increased its desirability, environmentally speaking.
Legislative initiatives, including the New Source Performance Standards of 19712 and the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990,3 created incentives for electric utilities to burn low-sulfur coal. The Nation’s largest source of such coal is in the West: the Powder River Basin of Wyoming.4 While other factors (relative freight costs, labor costs, production costs, regional variation in demand for electricity, competing energy sources) undoubtedly contribute to both the increase in prices received by western coal mines and the stability of mining employment in some Western States, much of the impact can be attributed to the demand for coal with low sulfur content.
This excerpt is from an article published in the August 1997 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.
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Footnotes
1 Producer Price Index (PPI) data for coal are published by Bureau of Mines (BOM) districts. Coalbeds do not
always respect State boundaries, so some districts cross State
lines. The publication categories for PPI’s and the
approximate State equivalents are as follows: West (BOM 16–23)—Colorado, New
Mexico, Arizona, California, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota,
South Dakota, Montana, Alaska, Oregon, Washington; Midwest (BOM 9–12, 14,
15)—Oklahoma, Texas, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Arkansas,
Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri; South Appalachia (BOM 7, 8, 13)—Virginia, West
Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina;
North Appalachia (BOM
1–6)—Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan.
2 Bruce Ackerman and William Hassler, Clean Coal/Dirty Air (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1981).
3 US Coal Reserves: An Update by Heat and Sulfur Content (U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, 1993).
4 The Changing Structure of the US Coal Industry (U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, 1993), pp. 27–28.
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