Montana’s only underground coal mine will be allowed to increase its production nearly tenfold under emergency permitting procedures that bypass completion of a court-ordered environmental impact statement.
Under the accelerated plan green-lighted on June 6 by the Department of the Interior, Signal Peak Energy’s Bull Mountains coal mine can expand its annual production by nearly 50 million tons each of the next nine years, from 7 million–8 million tons to 22.8 million tons on federal lands and 34.5 million tons on adjacent private lands.
Since 2010, the 1,725-acre, 118-year-old mine near Roundup in central Montana’s Musselshell and Yellowstone counties has shipped more than 100 million tons of coal overseas, with 60 percent exported to Japan, 30 percent to South Korea, and 10 percent to Chile….
Montana Mine Gets Expedited Federal Permit to Dig Nearly 10 Times More Coal
