Surface mine reclamation in Eastern KY ‘alarmingly slow,’ leaving problems in its wake
When retired coal miner Phillip Johnson bought a small building several years ago, he had someone he knew with a bulldozer haul it to a secluded hollow in the steep mountains above where he’d grown up in Pike County.
On the way to the cabin, Johnson passed places where he had helped his father raise cattle decades before, along with crops and a big garden and two milk cows that fed the family.
Johnson added a porch to the 12- by 18-foot building and insulated the inside. It became a getaway spot for and he and his wife Charlene, and other family members, too.
Johnson, 77, said he sometimes stayed at the cabin for two or three days at a time, watching deer and birds and listening for the call of wild turkeys. He loved it most when snow blanketed the hollow.
But Johnson said he hasn’t been able to get to that cabin for more than two years.
Water rushing off a nearby surface coal mine that wasn’t fully reclaimed rutted out the road, he said, making it too rough to get across with his pickup truck.
“They never did fix it,” Johnson said of the coal company. “It was a nice little cabin. It’s just sitting there.”
The mine in Pike County is one of hundreds of surface-mined coal sites across Eastern Kentucky that have not been fully reclaimed as quickly as they should have, leaving barren ground and continued potential for environmental problems, according to a new report from the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center.
The report from the public-interest firm in Whitesburg tracked progress on reclamation at surface coal mines where no coal had been produced since at least 2022.
All of the permits should have completed the first phase of reclamation, but only 55% had done so by the summer of 2024 when researchers began their analysis, according to the report.
Federal law requires companies to take a number of steps to repair land after mining, including measures such as planting grass and vegetation to limit erosion, but the report found reclamation work has been “stalled” at many sites.
The slow pace of reclamation leaves the dangers of exposed, sheer walls in some places, and the potential for damage to adjoining property and pollution going into streams.
“The lack of progress that coal companies have made in cleaning up and reclaiming their old mines as required by law is staggering,” said Erin Savage, who produced the report with Rebecca Shelton, policy director of the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, and Mary Cromer, deputy director of the center.
“Right now, hundreds of idle mines are creating the risk of floods and landslides near homes and businesses in Kentucky years after they should have been cleaned up,” Savage said.
Delayed reclamation also leaves open scars in a region still working to recover from devastating flooding in 2022 — and hit by even more flooding earlier this month — while trying to develop tourism to diversify the economy, sapped by a sharp decline in the coal industry.
Mines reclaimed in phases
In surface mining, companies use explosives and heavy equipment to blast and dig away dirt and rock to retrieve coal from underground seams.
Production from underground mining in Eastern Kentucky topped surface production for many years, according to the Kentucky Geological Survey, but the ratio has been closer to even in recent years.
In the second quarter of 2023, for instance, Eastern Kentucky had 1.7 million tons of coal production at surface mines and 1.5 million tons from underground mines; the totals were 1.4 million tons from surface and 1.1 million tons from underground mines in the second quarter of 2024, according to the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet.
Companies use surface mining because it can be a cheaper way to uncover coal. In some cases, it’s the only economically viable way to mine.
Surface mining often creates cliffs, called highwalls.
The federal law on reclaiming surface mines — the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, or SMCRA — requires reclaiming the sites in three phases after mining.
In the first phase, companies are supposed to backfill and grade the site to eliminate highwalls, put back the topsoil, fertilize the ground and seed and plant it to get vegetation started, which helps reduce erosion.
Based on requirements in state law, it should take three to seven months to get through that phase, according to the report.
Coal companies post financial bonds to cover the cost of reclamation.
If the companies finish reclaiming sites themselves, they get their bonding obligation released. It is released in phases, with 60% refunded for completing the first phase of reclamation.
The amount of bond required varies with the size of each mine, but can total hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Completing Phase II requires establishing vegetation, including trees and shrubs, and ensuring the mine is not sending dirt into nearby streams.
Companies should be able to finish Phase II within 3 1/2 years of completing the mining, according to the report.
The third and final phase of reclamation requires that trees and shrubs on the site survive for five years, and the site must support post-mining use, such as providing hay and pasture or fish and wildlife habitat.
Companies should be able to achieve full reclamation in six years, the report said.
‘Alarmingly slow’
The authors pulled 408 permits to check based on various factors, including the mine type and the length of time since coal production stopped. None had produced coal since at least 2022.
The analysis showed many permit holders had not met expected timetables on any phase of reclamation.
▪ 55% of the 408 permits had not completed Phase I within the expected time of three-to-seven months after mining stopped, even years after coal production had ended in some cases.
Of the permits that had not achieved Phase I release, coal had not been mined at three-quarters of them dating back six years or more.
Some permit holders had not completed the first phase of reclamation more than 20 years after coal production stopped, the report found.
▪ Of the 388 permits where coal had been not produced in 3 1/2 years or more — the expected time to complete Phase II of reclamation — only 6.7% percent of them had completed Phase II.
More than 60% of the permits in that group had been in Phase II for more than five years.
▪ There had been no coal production on 333 permits since at least 2018, meaning there had been time to finish all reclamation work, but Phase III had not been completed at any of the sites, the report said.
The report noted that companies could have completed a significant amount of reclamation work on some permits but still not qualified for bond release because the entire mine site hadn’t met the criteria.
The results “overwhelmingly indicate that the pace of reclamation after the completion of coal removal is alarmingly slow,” the report said.
The report identified several companies with the highest number of permits to produce coal at sites where there had been no production for six years or more, and which hadn’t been fully reclaimed.
The company with the most, Lexington Coal Company LLC and LCC Kentucky, had at 42 permits, followed by Cardinal Reclamation Company with 28.
Representatives of Lexington Coal, which is based in West Virginia, did not respond to a request for comment.
Lanny E. Erdos, president of Cardinal Reclamation, told the Herald-Leader that the company has made significant progress in recent years in reclaiming sites that another company, Blackjewel, had mined before going bankrupt.
That work included eliminating more than 7.5 miles of highwall, planting 550,000 trees, remediating six sites needing long-term water treatment and achieving compliance on 135 notices of violation left behind by Blackjewel.
“Cardinal is in complete compliance with all applicable statutes and regulations in the state and continues to reclaim in accordance with the approved reclamation plans,” Erdos said in a statement to the newspaper.
“Additionally, Cardinal understands the importance of correcting past reclamation and environmental liabilities left because of the Blackjewel bankruptcy and is 100% committed to ensuring the protection of the public and the environment.”
The Energy and Environment Cabinet, which enforces the surface-mining law in Kentucky under federal oversight, said in a statement that the state’s goal is to make sure surface-mined land is properly restored.
“Reclamation is a long-term, multi-step process and can vary based on the size of the operation, the number of coal seams mined, the mining methods used and the post-mining land use being implemented,” the statement said. “It requires careful planning and compliance with regulatory standards.
The cabinet said a large surface-mining operation uncovering multiple seams of coal typically requires three-to-five years to complete the mining, eliminate highwalls, restore topsoil and pre-mining drainage patterns, and apply initial seeding.
Based on historical data, it’s about 11 years between a mining permit being issued and a company being released from Phase III bonding, the cabinet said.
The state has approved 113,475 acres for one of the three phases of bond release in the last five years — 44% of that for final Phase III release, according to the cabinet.
“While some mining operations may face unique challenges that affect the timing of reclamation, Team Kentucky continues to actively monitor and enforce compliance to ensure that permittees meet their reclamation obligations,” the statement said.
The U.S. Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation and Enforcement, which oversees Kentucky’s enforcement of federal law, said in its most recent review that the state’s work continued to uphold the intent of federal law, and noted Kentucky won an award for one repair project on an abandoned surface-mine site.
Industry has lost hundreds of jobs
The report from the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center acknowledged the reasons reclamation is slow at some mines can be complicated and based on factors specific to different sites. But it pointed to other factors as well, including costs which can run into millions of dollars if a company has to move lots of dirt and rock.
The report said that releasing up to 60% of the bond after Phase I of reclamation leaves little financial incentive for companies to finish the job.
Coal company bankruptcies also complicate the picture, requiring that another company assume obligation for cleaning up old mined areas or that the state hire a contractor to do the work.
Erdos, the head of Cardinal Reclamation, said the bankruptcy of Blackjewel “threatened to leave a significant environmental issue,” before Cardinal stepped in to do reclamation.
Companies that do reclamation can receive the bond money that was posted to cover the work.
Coal production and jobs fell off sharply in Eastern Kentucky beginning in 2012 because of several factors, including the loss of market share to natural gas, environmental regulations and the rise of renewable energy such as solar power.
There were 15,386 people employed in the coal industry in Eastern Kentucky in the first few months of 2009, for instance, but that number plunged to 3,106 at the end of 2019, according to the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet.
Jobs hit a low of 2,223 in mid-2020 in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
There has been a modest recovery since, but there were just 2,812 coal jobs in the region in the third quarter of 2024, the most recent period with available information from the state.
Mines in the region produced 22 million tons of coal in the first three months of 2009, compared with 2.8 million tons at the end of 2019 and 2.5 million tons in in July, August and September last year.
The loss of production helps explain difficult times for the industry, including bankruptcies.
‘Hide in loopholes’
Shelton said it appeared many coal companies “are abusing lax reclamation requirements.”
The report blames a lack of specific, enforceable times to complete reclamation.
The law says mined land is supposed to be reclaimed “as contemporaneously as possible,” but doesn’t define time limits.
State law has deadlines for the first phase of reclamation, for instance requiring that highwalls at certain mines be eliminated with 180 days, but doesn’t set an overall deadline for finishing reclamation, according to the report.
The report said state regulators are citing companies for reclamation-related violations such as a lack of contemporaneous reclamation, but without deadlines for Phase II and III work, “regulators have little recourse for permits stalled in later stages of reclamation,” the report concludes.
The report points to what Cromer called the “structural failure of (federal law) to address the situations that arise with industry-wide decline,” and not inaction by state or federal officials, as the problem.
Fixing that will require changes at the federal level to establish clear, enforceable timelines at each phase of reclamation, she said.
“That way, they won’t be able to hide in loopholes and avoid accountability any longer,” Cromer said.
In addition to environmental problems, stalled reclamation can keep private owners from using the land.
In many cases, coal companies lease land from owners to mine. The company typically has a right to continued access to the site until reclamation is complete, so if the company doesn’t finish the job, the land remains tied up.
Delays in reclaiming land also put off potential beneficial post-mining uses for the land, such as creating sites for tourism, farming or planting trees, which would help mitigate climate change, according to the report.
And reclamation work provides jobs and tax revenue for local governments.
“Instead of being liabilities, these old mines are supposed to be stabilized, cleaned up, and revegetated so they can benefit our ecosystems, local landowners and our communities,” Savage said.
This story was originally published February 26, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
