Gobco mining coal waste piles, turning gob into cash

COEBURN, Va. – Back when Walt Crickmer was running Clinchfield Coal Co., he didn’t think much about gob piles.

“All they were, was just liabilities,” Crickmer said of the huge coal waste piles left over from mining in the early 20th century. “It was a legacy that came with the business, and it was left over from a bygone era. That’s all it was.”

Now, he said, the massive waste piles – some containing more than a million tons of material – might be worth enough to turn a profit reclaiming the land.

So these days, Crickmer is running a different kind of coal company, one whose business is cleaning up the messes left by others many decades ago. Gobco is the largest of eight companies in the state that mine the piles and sell the coal to be burned for electricity.

Like everything else, the market for gob has been hurt by the recession, Crickmer said, but there’s hope on the horizon. When the Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center – Dominion’s new 585-megawatt coal-fired power plant – comes online in 2012, it will be possible to generate electricity from millions of tons of waste coal that was never before marketable.

He also believes that because of the power plant’s ability to burn gob, it will be the most significant thing to come along in decades with regard to cleaning up Southwest Virginia’s polluted watersheds.

But there are a lot of piles. According to the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy, hundreds litter Virginia’s coalfield counties. Just 15 have been completely removed; seven are currently being mined.

Even if gob is burned at a rate of a million tons a year, Crickmer said, it would take more than a century to use it all.

But for once, coal operators and power companies are in agreement with government regulators and environmentalists: Removing the piles is the best solution.

Gob creations

Coal processing has changed over the years, said Richard Davis, abandoned mine land projects coordinator for DMME’s Department of Mined Land Reclamation. A far cry from the technology used at today’s coal preparation plants, coal mined a century ago was simply sorted by size.

“Whatever the market dictated at the time was the product shipped out,” he said. “Everything else, plus the rock itself went into the pile.”

The waste coal was piled up through the mid-20th century, he said, leaving hundreds of piles ranging in size from less than a tenth of an acre to 20 acres – and some hundreds of feet thick.

In those days, he said, there was no regulation – and it wasn’t until years later that people became concerned about the piles’ impacts on health, safety and the environment.

The piles often are unstable and can slide into homes, roads and streams, Davis said. They also have a tendency to spontaneously catch fire because they generate a lot of internal heat, and can send unhealthy fumes into surrounding communities.

The gob piles can also be a deadly hazard to people who walk over them or work near them. In the 1950s, two men who were working at a gob pile near the Dickenson County town of Clinchco were killed when it collapsed.

Davis said environmental problems include erosion of the piles, sedimentation leaking into streams, and drainage with harmful effects on water quality.

Brad Kreps, Clinch Valley program director for the Nature Conservancy, said the piles are “a serious threat to water quality in Southwest Virginia.”

“As the gob piles erode into the stream, that material starts in the headwaters, but it eventually moves downstream and can impact fish, freshwater mussels, aquatic insects, the whole array of freshwater species that are in our rivers,” Kreps said. “The Clinch River is just such a special river system. It’s got one of the highest concentrations of rare species of any river system in North America.”

Years ago, DMME reclaimed some of the piles with a short-term method that Davis compares to “putting a band-aid over a deep wound.”

“Our reclamation method often used grading to stabilize the pile, installing drainage controls to divert any water from around the pile, covering the pile with soil and establishing vegetative cover,” he said.

“It’s a quick, reliable fix over a short time period, and often we had to look at economics, too. The cost to completely remove a gob pile can run into millions of dollars.”

Unfortunately, he said, gob piles reclaimed by this method still pose a danger to people and the environment.

Profitable solution

The Clinchfield No. 9 Gob Pile filled a whole valley. With 800,000 tons of material, it was three-quarters of a mile long. Part of it was on fire. Working nonstop, it took Gobco a year and a half to remove it.

Davis said companies like Gobco are allowed to remove the piles when it’s unlikely that they’ll ever be reclaimed through surface mining – and the state has a special process to ensure that the proper environmental safeguards are in place.

The company doing the project uses equipment to load the gob into trucks and haul it off, then re-establishes any stream channels on the natural ground, using the proceeds from the sale of the coal to pay for the project, he said. Then, DMME pays to plant the site in native hardwood trees.

“Our experience has proven that the best reclamation method is complete removal of the gob pile,” Davis said.

On the former site of the Cranes Nest Gob Pile outside Coeburn, a clear stream now runs where the pile once rested.

The site was first mined perhaps 100 years ago, Davis said, then surface-mined 50 years later. In 2008, the pile was removed and some of the rock used to eliminate part of an old highwall left by the surface mine. The site, he said, shows how reclamation has progressed over the years.

“What they’re getting out of this is acres of trees where they had acres of coal waste before,” Crickmer said of landowners.

Of the seven jobs Gobco has taken on, Crickmer said, one lost money, two broke even and three turned a profit. The seventh one is only partially complete; he’s waiting for the market to improve before working on it again.

And while he must choose projects that are economically feasible, he said his business is just as much about cleaning up the environment as it is about making money.

“There’s a lot of great environmental guys in the coal industry,” Crickmer said. “People that have worked in the coal industry the last 30 years, since the ’70s, have all developed into great environmental people.”

Hybrid energy

Greg Edwards, spokesman for Dominion, said the power plant’s relatively new technology is what will allow it to burn gob.

“The boiler design is capable of burning waste coal,” Edwards said, explaining that the “circulating fluidized bed” technology used in the plant will enable it to burn a variety of fuels and still meet stringent air emissions limits.

He said Dominion is already identifying fuel sources.

“We’re totally supportive of efforts to remove gob piles from the countryside and look forward to being a part of that process pretty soon,” Edwards said. “We expect gob to be a significant part of the fuel that will be used at the plant.”

He said the plant is 58 percent complete and still on schedule to open in 2012; most of the steel has been erected and workers are beginning to enclose the 210-foot-high boiler building.

The plant’s air permit allows for run-of-mine coal, which is unprocessed, to be burned along with gob and biomass for the generation of electricity.

The reason this is important, Crickmer said, is that much of the gob piled up around the region has become too oxidized from its interaction with the air; that causes problems when the coal is run through a preparation plant.

For that reason, he said, so far he’s only been able to mine – and sell – relatively unoxidized piles. When the plant opens, he said, he’ll be able to go after all of the piles – including some highly oxidized piles that contain 2 million tons of material.

One of the first to be burned at the plant, he said, will likely be the Hurricane Creek Gob Pile, which is about a mile long and a major polluter on the Hurricane Fork of Dumps Creek in Russell County.

“It’s going to make a big bang for the environment in Southwest Virginia, there’s no doubt about it,” Crickmer said of the power plant. “This is truly something that’s going to make a significant impact to the water quality in the Clinch and the Powell River Basin.”

The downside

The Sierra Club, the nation’s largest environmental organization, also recognizes the environmental damage caused by old gob piles. But, according to the organization, in some cases the environmental effects of burning the coal can make removing the piles more harmful to the environment than leaving them alone.

“Burning the coal is bad. It’s as simple as that,” said Randy Francisco, associate regional representative for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign in Pennsylvania and the organization’s resident expert on gob piles.

“Cleaning up a stream is a good thing, but burning the coal is bad,” he said.

What exactly should be done with the gob piles depends on where they are and how long they’ve been there, Francisco said. Some are best left alone, while others should be placed in a sealed landfill.

“Whatever we do, we don’t need to burn it in the end,” he said.

He added that burning waste coal generates all of the same problems that come with burning regular coal – including air pollution and the creation of ash with harmful chemical concentrations. The Sierra Club favors a speedy end to the burning of coal for electricity.

But, with the practical view of an organization that’s trying to preserve a uniquely diverse river system in Virginia, Kreps said cleaning up the piles and burning them is certainly better than leaving them alone.

“When we’ve looked at the threat to the Clinch River, clearly abandoned mine lands are one of the most serious threats to water quality, and so when there are ways to clean up abandoned mine lands and these waste coal piles and get them out of there so they’re not impacting the watershed, that is a step in the right direction,” Kreps said.

Coal karma

While the piles create a conundrum for environmental organizations opposed to burning coal, state and federal regulators are definite: They want the piles to go.

Crickmer said it’s an opportunity for the coal industry, which, he admits, hasn’t always had the best environmental record, to clean up some of its messes.

“After 30 years of Pittston Coal, I’m up in years, and I guess I could’ve retired, but I didn’t,” he said.

Instead, he smiles about the minnows and lizards that have appeared in reclaimed creeks – and the knowledge that, after all these years, he’s able to put some of the land back better than he found it.

dmccown@bristolnews.com | (276) 791-0701

Several companies are working in Virginia to reclaim coal from waste piles, including:
* Gobco LLC
* Energy Technologies Inc.
* Mountaineer Enterprises
* C&S Construction & Excavating
* Virginia City Enterprises
* The Black Diamond Co.
* G&J Coal Co. Inc.
* Nine Mile Spur LLC

Source: Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals & Energy