Peabody Energy: Not a Good Neighbor
Peabody at a glance
Peabody Energy is based in St. Louis, Missouri with mining operations in Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Arizona, Wyoming, New Mexico, Australia and Venezuela.
Peabody Energy recently announced its plan to sell its Appalachian holdings, which include mine operations in West Virginia and one mine in eastern Kentucky. It still operates a number of mines in western Kentucky.
Environmental Record
Peabody Energy and its subsidiaries operate 15 mines in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, where mountaintop removal and other forms of radical strip mining have destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of land and hundreds of miles of headwater mountain streams. In 2001, massive flooding caused an estimated $143 million in damages across seven counties in West Virginia. Peabody Energy, Massey Energy, and other large coal companies were sued for practices that contributed to the widespread flood damage.
Labor Record
According to the United Mine Workers of America, Peabody Energy has “systematically closed its union mines and replaced them with non-union mines over the past 15 years.” Currently 9 Peabody Energy mines are unionized in the US, while 19 are non-union.
A fact-finding delegation of religious leaders visited communities in western Kentucky in July 2006 to learn about conditions facing workers in Peabody Energy’s Midwestern coal mines. Their report found that “Peabody Energy is systematically de-unionizing its mines, reducing miner health protections, and eliminating job security and retirement benefits…Miners are being denied their hard-won voice in life and death workplace decisions.”
In 2006, 500 religious leaders signed a letter to Peabody Energy saying, “Don’t intimidate and threaten miners who want a union.” Many local governments in Kentucky, including the city councils of Henderson, Sturgis, Nortonville, and White Plains, have passed resolutions calling for the company to respect workers rights.
Peabody Energy’s push to subsidize coal-to-liquid and coal-to-gas
Peabody Energy has taken the lead in promoting coal-to-liquid and coal-to-gas technologies. In 2006 Peabody Energy executives chaired a committee of the National Coal Council (NCC) which released a report in March of 2006 called “Coal: America’s Energy Future.”
Peabody Energy’s vision calls for production of 2.6 million barrels per day of synthetic transportation fuel from coal by 2025. The Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) calculates that this would require an expansion of coal mining of 43% above today’s level and increase carbon dioxide emissions by more than 2 billion tons above current projections for 2025. This projection of additional CO2 pollution is conservative, since it is based on the industry’s unsupported claim that 30% of the carbon dioxide generated by coal conversion will be injected and stored underground.
Read the NRDC's report, "Peabody’s Energy Fantasy: America’s Nightmare" for more information on Peabody Energy's vision for the future of coal.