Step right up, buy your coal! Think there's nothing you can get for a penny these days? Wrong, wrong, wrong. The federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is selling 167 million tons of Wyoming coal, and the minimum bid is one penny for 10 tons.
The current retail price of that coal is around 10 bucks a ton, so your potential profit margin is about 500,000%. That's better than cocaine trafficking, and it's perfectly legal. Step below the orange worm orgy and read about a chance to turn $125,327 into $1.67 billion dollars, but hurry. September 18 is the deadline, and we have operators standing by.
Here's the gory details. The BLM is offering to lease 1253 acres, containing 167 million tons of coal, 12 miles north of Gillette, Wyoming, for a minimum bid of a lousy $100 an acre. It's called the Hay Creek II Coal Tract.
Multinational construction giant Kiewit, through its mining subsidiaries, already runs the nearby Buckskin Mine, and wants that coal. BLM is obligated to offer those lands for competitive bid, before just surrendering it to Kiewit for a pittance.
There are some other costs in the fine print: a $3/acre annual payment, and royalty payments of 12.5%. Those royalty payments could eventually reach millions per year paid to BLM.
You do have to dig through an average of 163 feet of dirt to reach the two coal veins, which are themselves 26-68 feet thick, on average.
But hey. Most of the heavy equipment mine operators in Wyoming are non-union, so it won't cost that much to operate an open pit strip mine.
I've been there a few times. It's grassland and prairies, so just smooth it out and plant it when you're done, and call it reclaimed.
This lease is one of several absurdly cheap sales of federal coal recently. See, for instance:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
I'm not a big fan of coal, under any circumstances. If the BLM wants to help destroy the earth by hastening climate change, at least they could get a fair price for our coal. (snark)
I am trying to think of a phrase as alliterative and clever as "leave the grease in the ground," for coal.
Leave the brown in the ground?
Leave the black in the outback?
Leave the vein under the plain?
Help me, people.