Black Mesa: Coal, Water, and a Contested Bargain
Near Kayenta, Arizona
Beneath Black Mesa, the high plateau rising south of Kayenta, lies one of the American Southwest's largest coal deposits. For nearly five decades Peabody Energy mined it, and the story of what it cost the land and the people living on it is still unfolding.
The Black Mesa and Kayenta mines operated together as a single complex. The Black Mesa mine fed a two hundred seventy-three-mile pipeline that slurried pulverized coal mixed with water all the way to a power station in Nevada, among the longest coal-slurry pipelines ever built. The Kayenta mine, which opened in nineteen seventy-three, supplied the Navajo Generating Station near Page, Arizona, producing electricity for much of the urban Southwest.
The water driving the slurry came from the Navajo Aquifer, the same ancient groundwater that Navajo and Hopi communities depend on for drinking and livestock. Tribal members and environmental groups alleged that decades of heavy pumping had measurably reduced springs across the mesa. Both tribes regard water as sacred. The dispute ran for decades and was never fully resolved.
The Black Mesa mine closed in two thousand five when its Nevada power station shut down. The Kayenta mine held on until August of two thousand nineteen, delivering its last coal that August, a few months before the Navajo Generating Station itself closed in November. The closure eliminated hundreds of jobs on a reservation where unemployment was already severe. Peabody's reclamation work continues on thousands of acres of disturbed land. Community members say the full debt to the land has never been settled.
