Peabody Energy Peabody Energy is a coal mining and energy company headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri. Its primary business consists of the mining, sale, and distribution of coal, which is purchased for use in electricity generation and steelmaking. Peabody ...

coal mining operations in the Black Mesa

plateau In geology and physical geography, a plateau (; ; ), also called a high plain or a tableland, is an area of a highland consisting of flat terrain that is raised sharply above the surrounding area on at least one side. Often one or more sides ...

of the Four Corners region in the western

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

began in the 1960s and ended in 2019. The plateau overlaps the reservations of the Navajo and Hopi

Tribes The term tribe is used in many different contexts to refer to a category of human social group. The predominant worldwide usage of the term in English is in the discipline of anthropology. This definition is contested, in part due to confli ...

. Controversy arose from an unusually generous mineral lease agreement between the Tribes and

, the

coal Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal is formed when ...

company's use and degradation of a potable source of water to transport coal via a pipeline from the mine to a power plant hundreds of miles away, and the public health and environmental impacts of strip mining on tribal lands.

Controversy

In 1964, Peabody Energy (then Peabody Western Coal), a publicly traded energy company based in the

Midwestern United States The Midwestern United States, also referred to as the Midwest or the American Midwest, is one of four census regions of the United States Census Bureau (also known as "Region 2"). It occupies the northern central part of the United States. I ...

, signed a

contract A contract is a legally enforceable agreement between two or more parties that creates, defines, and governs mutual rights and obligations between them. A contract typically involves the transfer of goods, services, money, or a promise to tr ...

with the Navajo Tribe and two years later with the Hopi Tribe, allowing the company mineral rights and use of an

aquifer An aquifer is an underground layer of water-bearing, permeable rock, rock fractures, or unconsolidated materials ( gravel, sand, or silt). Groundwater from aquifers can be extracted using a water well. Aquifers vary greatly in their characteris ...

. The contract was negotiated by prominent natural resources attorney John Sterling Boyden, who claimed to be representing the Hopi Tribe while actually on the payroll of Peabody. It offered unusually advantageous terms for Peabody and was approved despite widespread opposition. The contract is also controversial because of misrepresentations made to the Hopi and Navajo tribes. Peabody Energy developed two coal

strip mine Surface mining, including strip mining, open-pit mining and mountaintop removal mining, is a broad category of mining in which soil and rock overlying the mineral deposit (the overburden) are removed, in contrast to underground mining, in whic ...

s on the Black Mesa reservation: the Black Mesa Mine and the Kayenta Mine. Peabody Energy pumped water from the underground Navajo Aquifer for washing coal, and, until 2005, in a slurry pipeline operation to transport extracted coal to the Mohave Generating Station in

Laughlin, Nevada Laughlin is an unincorporated resort town and census-designated place in Clark County, Nevada, United States. It is located on the Colorado River, directly across from the much larger Bullhead City, Arizona. Laughlin lies south of Las Vegas, in ...

. With the pipeline operating, Peabody pumped, on average, 3 million gallons of water from the Navajo Aquifer every day. The aquifer is the main source of potable

groundwater Groundwater is the water present beneath Earth's surface in rock and soil pore spaces and in the fractures of rock formations. About 30 percent of all readily available freshwater in the world is groundwater. A unit of rock or an unconsolidated ...

for the Navajo and Hopi tribes, who use the water for farming and livestock maintenance as well as drinking and other domestic uses. The tribes alleged that the pumping of water by Peabody Energy caused a severe decline in potable water and the number of springs. Both tribes, situated in an arid semi-desert, attach religious significance to water, considering it sacred, and have cultural, religious, and practical objections to over-use of water. Peabody's Black Mesa Mine used the slurry to pump its coal through pipes to where the coal could be filtered and used in the Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nevada (which was shut down in 2005). The generating station produced energy for Arizona and southern

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

and

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a state in the Western region of the United States. It is bordered by Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. Nevada is the 7th-most extensive, ...

. This was the only coal slurry operation in the country and only plant that used groundwater for transport. Coal from the Kayenta mine was moved via conveyor belt to a silo from where it was loaded and shipped by train to the

Navajo Generating Station Navajo Generating Station was a 2.25-gigawatt (2,250 MW), coal-fired power plant located on the Navajo Nation, near Page, Arizona, United States. This plant provided electrical power to customers in Arizona, Nevada, and California. It also provi ...

coal plant. The Black Mesa Mine's last day of operation was December 31, 2005. The

Office of Surface Mining The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) is a branch of the United States Department of the Interior. It is the federal agency entrusted with the implementation and enforcement of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamati ...

approved Peabody's permit request to continue operations at the mine on December 22, 2008. However, in January 2010, an administrative law judge, on appeal of that approval, decided that the Final EIS did not satisfy the

National Environmental Policy Act The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is a United States environmental law that promotes the enhancement of the environment and established the President's Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). The law was enacted on January 1, 1970.Un ...

because it did not take into account changed conditions, and vacated the approval.Holt, Robert G. (administrative law judge) (7 January 2010
"Opinion In re: Black Mesa Complex Permit Revision"
Office of Hearings and Appeals, United States Department of the Interior Operations at the Kayenta Mine were ceased in 2019.

References

External links

Black Mesa Trust organizationBlack Mesa Indigenous Support"Peabody Energy,"
SourceWatch * Article and bibliography about Peabody water abstraction, published by a sacred land campaign group.
"Drawdown: An Update on Groundwater Mining on Black Mesa,"
a 2000 report (updated in 2006) by the

Natural Resources Defense Council The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is a United States-based 501(c)(3) non-profit international environmental advocacy group, with its headquarters in New York City and offices in Washington D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Bo ...

on the effects on the Hopi's and Navajo's drinking water sources {{coord, 36, 31, 29, N, 110, 23, 55, W, display=title Mining in Arizona Coal mining in the United States Hopi Reservation Navajo Nation Environmental impact of the coal industry Environment of Arizona Environmental controversies Navajo history Water and politics Water pollution in the United States Peabody Energy Native American-related controversies

Controversy

See also

References

Further reading

External links