Looking for coal job? Work on PlayStation skills first
WHILE on the campaign trail in West Virginia last year, Donald Trump donned a hardhat and pantomimed digging coal with a shovel. The coal miners in the audience would soon be back to work, he promised: “Get ready, because you are going to be working your asses off.”
The only problem: Coal miners no longer swing a pickax or wield a shovel. While coal companies are hiring again, executives are starting to search for workers who can crunch gigabytes of data or use a joystick to manoeuver mining vehicles hundreds of miles away.
“If you do PlayStation, you can run a 300-ton truck,” said Douglas Blackburn, a fourthgeneration miner himself who runs the industry consultancy Blackacre LLC. For an industry once notorious for its risks, “the worst that can happen is you sprain a thumb.”
The trend toward fewer workers, of course, is nothing new. The heyday of coal employment came in 1923, when the US industry – then reliant on laborers with hand tools, blast powder and oil lamps – had a record 863,000 miners, according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration.
Ever since, that number has fallen thanks to increasingly sophisticated machinery. The technological change took a leap forward in the 1980s with the expansion of large-scale mining in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, where the coal can be scooped out of the ground from above. The miners no longer had to tunnel underground.
In the Powder River Basin’s giant open-pit mines, large haul trucks now crisscross the sites day and night, collecting up to 400 tons of coal at a time from towering seams. High-school graduates with little experience often drive the trucks, taking home salaries that can be US$30 an hour. Trains that can stretch more than 100 cars long are loaded up mechanically with the coal and sent off to plants as far away as Georgia.
“Whether coal comes back or not is not necessarily directly related to jobs,” Heath Lovell, a spokesman for coal producer Alliance Resource Partners, said in an interview on NPR’s “On Point.” “We should be becoming more and more efficient, which would mean we could produce the same amount of coal with less employees.”
In Illinois, underground miners including Alliance Resource and Foresight Energy have a collection of longwall machines – computerised devices that cut coal from the earth in slices that can extend for miles – ready to ramp up production with minimal manpower if demand allows.
To be sure, Trump’s pledge has come true for some workers. Coal companies added 2,400 jobs since September, bringing the total to 51,000, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics. Coal companies are advertising for licensed mechanics and electricians, warehouse clerks and security guards.
Coal’s future, however, is likely to involve a new set of skills. It won’t be long before a miner is working out of an office in, say, Denver, where she’ll stare at computer screens and manoeuvre equipment in Wyoming, according to Blackburn. The miner – earning, perhaps, US$15 an hour – will monitor several massive trucks that largely steer themselves, he said.
Just as electric locomotives once replaced the pit ponies and mules in the mines, Caterpillar Inc. is already selling fleets of its “autonomous” haul trucks to Australian mining companies. One customer, iron-ore giant Fortescue Metals Group Ltd, has increased productivity by up to 30 per cent thanks to the vehicles’ better-than-human consistency and precision, Denise Johnson, Caterpillar’s head of resource industries, said at a Deutsche Bank summit on June 8.
“You can keep those trucks running 24/7,’’ Johnson said. “You don’t have to take bathroom breaks.’’
That sort of savings will be hard for US coal companies to resist as they struggle to stay competitive against the onslaught of cheap natural gas, solar and wind power. Caterpillar’s autonomous-mining technology is already being adopted by US customers and it’s expanding its offerings, a company spokesman said by email. The company declined to identify its customers. — WP-Bloomberg
Whether coal comes back or not is not necessarily directly related to jobs. We should be becoming more and more efficient, which would mean we could produce the same amount of coal with less employees. Heath Lovell, a spokesman for coal producer Alliance Resource Partners