Powder River Basin: America's Coal Floor

Somewhere beneath the high plains east of Gillette, Wyoming, there are coal seams one hundred feet thick. Not coal deposits. Seams: horizontal layers of compressed plant material from ancient swamp forests, so consistent in their depth and purity that surface mines can strip them open with equipment the size of apartment buildings and load the coal directly onto trains.

The Powder River Basin produces approximately forty percent of all the coal burned for electricity in the United States. That figure comes from the Energy Information Administration. It is not a Wyoming tourist board estimate. The Black Thunder Mine and the North Antelope Rochelle Mine, both in Campbell County, have each been consistently among the two most productive coal mines in the United States by tonnage for decades.

The mines are surface operations: no tunnels, no cages, no underground workers. Enormous electric shovels fill railroad cars that run directly to power plants in the Midwest and South. The scale is not something photographs convey. You have to see the truck tires to understand; they are twelve feet tall.

Wyoming's legislators, understanding that coal would not last forever, created the Permanent Mineral Trust Fund in nineteen seventy-four. Severance taxes on coal and other mineral extraction have accumulated billions of dollars in the fund, money set aside for Wyoming's future after the resource is gone.

That future is arriving faster than anticipated. Natural gas and renewables have undercut coal on price throughout the two thousand tens and twenties. The mines are still operating, but the long-term trajectory of the Powder River Basin economy is one of managed decline.