The decline in demand for coal has many coal energy companies in or approaching bankruptcy.
But what about the mess that they will leave behind — who will pay for that? Investors? Executives? Nope. Taxpayers.
A worsening financial crisis for the nation’s biggest coal companies is sparking concerns that U.S. taxpayers could be stuck with hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in cleanup costs across a landscape of shuttered mines stretching from Appalachia to the northern Plains.
Worries about huge liabilities associated with hundreds of polluted mine sites have mounted as Peabody Energy, the world’s largest publicly traded coal company, was forced to appeal to creditors for an extra 30 days to pay its debts. Two of the four other biggest U.S. coal companies have declared bankruptcy in the past six months.
Under a 1977 federal law, coal companies are required to clean up mining sites when they’re shut down. But the industry’s plummeting fortunes have raised questions about whether companies can fulfill their obligations to rehabilitate vast strip mines in Western states — many of which are on federally owned property — as well as mountaintop-removal mining sites in the East.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/can-coal-companies-afford-to-clean-up-coal-country/2016/04/01/c175570c-ec73-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html
Billions in profits during good times that should have gone for clean-up and mitigation efforts were ignored to preserve profits, buyback stocks to increase share price, and give massive bonuses to executives.
The coal industry is not alone. Every nuclear plant has a spent fuel storage pool with nowhere else to store it. Someone will have to pay for both the maintenance of these pools and sufficient security to protect these stores long after the nuclear power plants have ceased operations. Many nuclear plants will be reaching the end of their license in the next decade.
Fracking injects millions of gallons of toxic waste deep underground. If that ever bubbles up to the surface, who will clean that up?
The Elk River chemical spill in 2014 was also coal industry related. They declared bankruptcy and avoided any clean-up costs.
Energy is something we rely on for just about everything we do, and that dependency grows every year. But as we switch to newer and cleaner alternatives, the long-term aftermath of legacy energy sources needs to be addressed, sooner rather than later.