Help

BI’s Article search uses Boolean search capabilities. If you are not familiar with these principles, here are some quick tips.

To search specifically for more than one word, put the search term in quotation marks. For example, “workers compensation”. This will limit your search to that combination of words.

To search for a combination of terms, use quotations and the & symbol. For example, “hurricane” & “loss”.

Login Register Subscribe

Struggling coal companies pressed to face cleanup costs

Reprints

(Reuters) — Struggling coal companies must face the costs of cleaning up their spent mines even as they get pushed toward bankruptcy, the U.S. Interior Secretary said on Tuesday.

The mining industry is responsible for restoring old mine sites but a taxpayer subsidy called "self bonding" has allowed some of the largest companies to forgo a large share of cleanup insurance.

Bankrupt Alpha Natural Resources and Arch Coal have sought to jettison cleanup liabilities in bankruptcy court and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said officials will not tolerate such maneuvers.

"Even at a time of financial distress, it is still the responsibilities of these companies to do the reclamation that they signed up for," Jewell told lawmakers. Jewell was addressing the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

"We need to make sure that those companies are held accountable."

Of the roughly $2 billion in future cleanup costs facing Peabody Energy Corp., $1.47 billion of that is self-bonded and has no concrete backing. Those costs could fall to taxpayers during bankruptcy.

Investors have lately worried whether a call to replace self-bonds with costly surety bonds could push struggling Peabody closer to bankruptcy.

Read Next

  • Exxon case revives debate over corporate climate disclosures

    (Reuters) — Public corporations are supposed to warn investors about the risk to their businesses from climate change, but the tone and wording of those disclosures vary widely among big U.S. manufacturing, automotive and energy companies, according to company documents, and legal and corporate governance experts.