Mining The Prairies

The New Republic, March 24, 1973

Billings, Montana

UNDER the rolling plains of eastern Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas is one of the world’s last great energy reserves — nearly a trillion tons of lignite and sub-bitu­minous coal, about 35 billion of which are readily strippable.

Lewis and Clark first noted the coal beds a century and a half ago, but they were far from energy con­sumption centers and remained largely forgotten until the late 1960s.  Then, with little public awareness, giant energy companies began gobbling up coal leases and water rights and laying plans for strip mining, coal burning and coal gasification on a massive scale — plans that, if implemented, will radically alter the landscape and economy of the northern plains.

The energy companies’ interest in prairie coal was stimulated by sev­er­al concurrent happenings: rising urban smog levels which have made high-sulfur Appalachian coal unburnable in many cities; recent federal mine safety laws, which have made deep-mined coal more expensive to get at; and the soaring demand for fossil fuels, especially natural gas.  Prairie coal is not only low in sulfur but cheap to mine (it comes in thick seams with shallow overburdens).  It con­verts nicely to pipeline-quality gas.  And it was ripe for the taking.

The major owners of coal rights in the northern plains are, or were, the federal government, the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Indians and the Burlington Northern railroad.  The federal government until re­cently was eager to dispose of its coal rights with no environmental impact studies and with little regard for control of com­peting fuel sources by oil companies.  Until it stopped granting leases in 1971, the Interior Depart­ment had issued perpetual mining leases or explora­tory permits on 323,000 acres of coal lands in Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota.

The standard price for these coal rights was one dollar an acre per year plus 17.5 cents per ton of coal mined, plus, in a few cases, initial bonuses ranging up to a few hundred dollars per acre.  An acre of prairie coal land, depending on the thickness of the seam, can yield anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 tons of coal, worth two to three dollars a ton at the mine mouth.  The companies acquiring federal leases included Exxon, Mobil, Gulf, Atlantic-Richfield, Continental Oil, Sun Oil, Kerr-McGee and Peabody Coal.

The Crows of southeastern Montana own coal rights both on and off their reservation.  With encouragement from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, they and the North­ern Cheyennes sold mining leases and ex­ploratory per­mits on 517,000 acres at about the same prices as the federal government.  In one 1970 deal the Crows sold coal rights for 31,000 acres to Westmoreland Re­sources, an independent coal com­pany, for $450,000, or about $15 an acre.  On much of this land white ranch­ers have owned surface rights for three or four genera­tions.  Montana law gives owners of mineral rights the power to condemn surface lands necessary to their mining operations.  Westmoreland has used this power to drive out ranchers around Sarpy Creek, 100 miles southeast of Billings, and plans to begin strip mining there next year.

The enormous mineral holdings of the Burlington Northern are the legacy of the 40 million acre land grant to the Northern Pacific, stretching in a checker­board pattern from Minnesota to the Oregon and Washington coast.  Though much of that land was sold off, the Burlington Northern retains 2.4 million acres of surface rights plus 6.1 million acres of mineral rights.  (Keep in mind that the size of Rhode Island is 768,000 acres, of New Jersey 4.8 million acres.)

The railroad estimates that its land contains 11 billion tons of re­cover­able coal.  It has leased about half of that at undis­closed prices to Con­tinental Oil, Peabody Coal and other energy companies and intends to keep on leas­ing.  “Coal is the ‘now’ energy source,” says BN assist­ant vice president for minerals Ernest Thurlow.

THE AMASSING of coal rights is one part of the picture.  The other part is water, which is essential to coal-fired gen­erating and gasifica­tion plants.

Water is a scarce com­modity in the arid West and generally has to be stored and transported by government-built dams and aque­ducts.  The agency that builds dams and dispenses water rights — the Bureau of Reclamation — is enthusi­astically in favor of rapid coal de­vel­opment.

As the need for additional irrigated farmland disappears, the Bureau must find other justifications for new projects.  Development of coal resources is an ideal one.  The Bureau talks of diverting water from the Yellowstone, Bighorn and other rivers to the coal-rich basin be­tween Gillette, Wyoming and Colstrip, Montana.  Though aqueducts have not yet been built, the Bureau has sold 10-year options on 700,000 acre-feet of water to a dozen oil, gas and coal companies, including Exxon, Gulf, Shell, Mobil, Sun, Kerr-McGee, Westmoreland, Pea­body and Colorado Interstate Gas.  Westmoreland’s water had pre­viously been reserved for agricultural use by the Crows.

With the basic resources coal and water largely locked up by energy companies, the future of the northern plains depends on what those companies are allowed to do.  A vision of what could be in store is con­tained in the 1971 North Central Power Study, con­ducted by the Bureau of Reclamation in collaboration with 35 electric utilities.

The NCPS proposes construc­tion of 42 mine-mouth generating plants that would be fueled with strip-mined coal and cooled with gov­ern­ment-transported water.  These plants would gen­erate 400 billion kilo­watts of electricity annually, more than is currently produced by any country in the world save the US and Russia.  They would require 210 mil­lion tons of strip-mined coal and 2.6 million acre-feet of water per year, or about one-third the average flow of the Yellowstone River.  Electricity generated by the plants would travel by high-voltage trans­mission lines to St. Louis, Kansas City, Minneapolis-St. Paul and other Midwest cities, and west to Seattle and Portland.  In all proba­bility the NCPS plan will never be fully im­plemented, but even partial implementation would dwarf the mine-mouth complex currently being built in the Four Corners area of the Southwest.

Besides electricity generation, the energy companies are talking about building scores of plants to convert strip-mined coal into pipeline gas.  The impact of all these energy-exporting plans would be tremendous.  The strip mining necessary to feed the generating and gasification facil­i­ties would devour hundreds of thou­sands of acres.  Though restor­ation of strip-mined land is theoretically possible, it is excep­tionally difficult in arid areas.  Smoke from coal-fired generating plants, though relatively low in sulfur, would pour an enor­mous amount of pollutants into the clear Big Sky, causing unknowable damage to downwind agricul­ture.  The Environmental Defense Fund estimates that the 42 plants envisioned by the NCPS would emit more sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides and fly ash than are currently emitted by all sources in New York City and Los Angeles combined.  Ranching, farming and recrea­tion would also be affected by the diver­sion of scarce water for industrial purposes.  Construction and opera­tion of mines and plants would bring in hundreds of thousands of new residents, more than quadrupling the population of the coal-bearing area.  Along with rapid population growth would come trailer camps, tract homes, highways, inflated land prices, higher taxes and a host of social problems that have thus far eluded small towns and rural areas.

THE REACTION of prairie residents to these potential changes is divided.  Many local businessmen welcome the imminent transition from a slow agricultural economy to a booming energy-exporting one; they feel it will be good for jobs and profits.  Some old-time ranch­ers, while not enthusiastic, accept the coal rush as in­evitable and have sold or leased their land to energy companies for slightly more than its value as ranch­land.

A good many ranchers, young people and others, however, are fight­ing mad.  Their ancestors home­steaded this land and they want their children to go on farming it.  They like its unspoiled vistas, free-flow­ing rivers, fish and wildlife.  They find it difficult to believe that cattle and wheat and rural values can co-exist with strip-mining and coal-burning, and they worry about what will happen when the coal is gone.  What will then become of the unemployed work­ers, the aband­oned power plants, the piles of overbur­den, dammed rivers and empty pipelines?  “Don’t underesti­mate us,” warns Carolyn Alderson, wife of a Wyoming rancher.  “Don’t lump us with the topsoil, as overburden to be tossed aside.  We are descendants of those who fought for this land and we are prepared to do it again. ”

Resistance is taking shape in several ways.  Farmers, ranchers, con­ser­vationists and others have formed a regional coalition called the North­ern Plains Resources Council to seek a moratorium on coal devel­op­ment until strict environmental safeguards are adopted, a position also taken by the Farmers Union and many national environmental organ­i­zations.  The Northern Cheyennes have had second thoughts about Continen­tal Oil’s proposal to build four gasification plants on their reservation, have postponed negotiations and decided to draft their own environmental code.  (Indian reservations are not covered by federal or state envir­onmental laws.)

Public officials have grown wary too; they’ve seen the fate of Appa­la­chia and earlier mining ventures in the West and don’t want a repe­ti­tion.  “Coal development represents a continuation of what has been the traditional history of Montana exploitation of its re­sources with a minimum of economic benefit to the state,” says Montana Lands Com­missioner Ted Schwinden.  Tom Judge, the newly elected Democratic governor of Montana, has called for an increased tax on coal and “the strongest strip mining control regula­tions in the history of this coun­try.”

Pending in the state legislatures of Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota are bills that would require the issuance of an­nual — and revocable — permits to strip miners, impose strict reclamation stand­ards, revise the eminent do­main laws (now stacked in favor of sub-surface rights owners) and boost severance taxes on extraction of minerals.  Another proposal would create local publicly owned energy districts with popularly elected direc­tors that could own coal land, build generators and sell electric power.  The districts would operate under en­vironmental rules that reflect local concerns, and would retain their profits for local public purposes.

WHATEVER happens to these state-level bills — and they all face stiff opposition from private energy inter­ests — the deeper questions raised by the prairie coal rush have to do with national energy policy and the re­lation between people, corporations and government.

Sooner or later sources of energy will be developed that don’t ravage land, air and water — but why not sooner rather than later?  Most gov­ernment and corpo­rate thinking seems to presume that fossil fuels, because they are there, must be exploited.  Thus, the federal govern­ment subsidizes coal gasification and liquefaction research (a subsidy that the energy corpo­rations, who’ll make billions off the processes, hardly need) but shows only passing interest in solar, wind and other hydrocarbon substi­tutes.  Development of technology that would make fossil fuel utilization more efficient — coal-burning generators waste about 60 percent of coal’s energy, and big automobile engines are notoriously wasteful of petroleum — is also low on the federal priority list.

And what of the people’s right to participate in de­cisions that affect their lives in fundamental ways?  Energy companies have already scarred Appalachia and sullied the Southwest without much compas­sion for, or consultation with, the residents of those re­gions.  The citi­zens of the northern plains now appear to be equally at the mercy of absentee corporations.  The owners of most mineral rights are out­siders who pay little in the way of taxes and royalties mostly to the federal government and a private railroad.

Federal agencies such as the Bureau of Reclamation have their own in­terests to look after.  State governments offer the most hope, but state officials are often connected with or influenced by outside cor­porations.  Some form of local public ownership of basic resources might be an answer, but it is a distant possibility at best.