The Bureau of Land Management has announced that it will end coal mining leases in the Powder River Basin.
Good.
The Bureau of Land Management announced Thursday that it would no longer make federally managed lands in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin available for new coal mining leases, drawing condemnation from the fossil fuel industry in the region that produces the most coal in the country, but delivering a boon to the nation’s clean energy transition.
The Powder River Basin, a geological formation that covers much of northeast Wyoming and a portion of southeast Montana, has been the nation’s largest source of coal for decades, with production there peaking in 2008. Since then, demand for coal has plummeted, largely due to the rise of natural gas and renewable energy. Taking federal coal off the table in the basin could all but put an expiration date on the nation’s thermal coal industry.
“This is a really critical, and frankly long overdue step that BLM has taken,” said Melissa Hornbein, an attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center, which was part of the legal team that represented several environmental groups in two legal challenges to the Bureau of Land Management’s previous resource management plans for the area.
Juxtaposing the large number of environmental issues from mining coal, as well as lease terms are more subsidies than they are a revenue source for the government, this is an unalloyed good/
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