Meet Your New Bureau of Land Management: A Giant Coal Seam

Subtle it ain’t: The BLM goes all in for coal development

By Paul Rauber

April 6, 2017

Bureau of Land Management

Anyone logging into the home page of the Bureau of the Land Management is in for a surprise. Instead of the scenic vistas of the past, the greeting image is brutal: A massive coal seam at Peabody Energy’s North Antelope Rochelle open-pit mine in Wyoming, the largest in the world. (The image was apparently sourced from Wikimedia Commons.) Here’s what the page used to look like:

Obviously, the Trump administration is moving rapidly to put its stamp on the federal agency that administers nearly 250 million acres of public land, mostly in the western United States. The agency’s mission is “to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations,” but the Trump administration has made it clear that it intends to focus on the “productivity” part. In February, Trump’s BLM completed the largest lease sale of oil drilling rights in years—128 parcels, mostly in Wyoming, for $129.3 million. In March, Trump signed the repeal of the BLM’s “Planning 2.0” rule, which industry groups blamed for slowing fossil fuel development on federal lands. Also in March, the BLM finalized a 55-million-ton coal lease on the Greens Hollow tract in Utah. “The United States has more coal than any other nation on Earth, and we are lucky to be at a time in our history that we have the technology available to responsibly mine coal and return our land to equal or better quality after,” proclaimed Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.

And yet—all the bluster and bravado in the Trump administration cannot stop the long decline of coal mining in the United States. According to the Energy Information Administration, coal production last year was off 18 percent from the year previous. The easy availability of natural gas and the plummeting costs of renewables are making coal increasingly irrelevant. Just days ago, PacRim Coal, LP abandoned its decades-old plans to develop the Chuitna Coal Project, an enormous open-pit coal mine in Alaska that would have destroyed a productive salmon stream.

The BLM can advertise coal all it wants—but it can’t make anyone buy it.