In September, a coal mine reopened in Utah’s Coal Country. But the mine’s owner, Wolverine Fuels, can’t find enough people to fill the estimated 350 jobs needed to staff it.
“The workforce is just not out there,” said Carson Pollastro, Wolverine’s chief executive officer, during a panel at Utah State University Eastern in Carbon County earlier this year.
Pollastro and panel moderator Brian Sommers, president of the Utah Mining Association, attributed the coal industry’s challenges to federal regulations, such as the Bureau of Land Management’s leasing processes or the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant rules.
This is a common explanation for the industry’s struggles in Utah. Federal government regulations and Democratic policies are frequently blamed. “I don’t want to see coal go away, and my deep feeling down inside is that it all depends on who we have for administrations in Washington,” Lynn Sitterud, outgoing commissioner for Emery County, one of the two counties that make up Utah’s Coal Country, told High Country News.
The reality on the ground is more complicated. In Emery County, for example, Wolverine’s Fossil Rock Mine reopened — but the local workforce doesn’t seem to want to go underground.
“We’re all a dying breed.”
Since the late 1800s, coal has been central to the economy and culture of Carbon and Emery counties. Most locals, if they’re not active or retired miners themselves, have a relative or ancestor who worked in the mines. Sculptures of heroic miners rise in the center of most of the towns. “This whole area was raised on coal mining,” said Jared Simms, a fourth-generation coal miner who’s been working underground for 18 years.
But the coal industry has changed a lot in recent years. As of 2020, Carbon County had no active coal mines, and only four, including Fossil Rock, continue to operate in Emery. Coal jobs in Utah fell by half from the early 1980s to the 1990s. Some mines shuttered, while those that stayed open needed fewer workers as technology advanced. In 1981, one coal miner produced close to two tons per hour. By 1997, that amount exceeded seven tons. Mines continued to churn out more and more coal with fewer and fewer people, until production began declining in the early 2000s as natural gas and renewable energy became cheaper sources of power.
“We’re all a dying breed,” said Simms, who works at Skyline, another Wolverine-owned mine.
Throughout Simms’ career, he’s seen a lot of mines close. And all the easy-to-mine coal seams are gone, he said. The Utah Geological Survey, in a 2015 report, said, “Utah coal mines face steady reserve depletions and difficult mining conditions.”
More mines will likely shutter in the next 10 to 15 years, when PacifiCorp, a utility company, retires Hunter and Huntington, the region’s two major coal-fired power plants. Some companies, including Wolverine, also export to Japan. But that will become more challenging when a ban on shipping coal out of Richmond, California, goes into effect in 2026. Carbon and Emery county leaders are exploring carbon fiber as the next use for coal — carbon fiber is a strong, lightweight material with multiple industrial uses — but it’s unclear whether manufacturing it could fully replace coal demand from power plants.
“You can get that (pay) a lot of places, and you don’t have to go like a mouse under the little Earth and worry about stuff falling on your head.”
The economic trends obscure a more fundamental challenge, though: It’s a lot harder now to convince young people to go underground, especially in a more diverse local economy. Wolverine Fuels is hiring entry-level miners at $26 per hour.
“You can get that (pay) a lot of places, and you don’t have to go like a mouse under the little Earth and worry about stuff falling on your head,” said Mike Dalpiaz, leader of the Western district of the United Mine Workers of America, which is headquartered in Carbon County.
In 2015, Price City, the largest town in the area at 8,000 people, erected a memorial to miners who have died in Carbon County from mining disasters like explosions or cave-ins, or suffered slower deaths from black lung disease. Nearly 1,400 names in bronze letters cover the black plaques.
George Deeter, Simms’ brother-in-law, worked in the mines briefly but ultimately decided to leave after all the “old-time miners” he talked with told him, “It wasn’t if you would be injured on the job, it’s just when and how bad.”
ACCORDING TO THE National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, coal mining injuries have steadily declined since the 1980s, while fatal disasters have declined significantly since the early 20th century. Problems do persist, though: The Mine Safety and Health Administration found 23 violations at Gentry Mountain Mine near the Huntington Power Plant earlier this year, including dangerous accumulations of combustible materials and electrocution hazards.
Some miners still say the industry is safe, though, and some young people hope that coal mining continues. “I think there’s a bright future in it,” said Dillion Grimmett, a 31-year-old coal miner who works at Gentry.
“The coal mines are full of dreamers.”
Grimmett’s family has been digging coal in the region for 150 years, ever since his ancestors immigrated to the area from Italy seeking economic opportunity. “The coal mines are full of dreamers,” he said.
Going underground wasn’t always Grimmett’s dream, though. “I just had my heart set on never mining coal,” he told High Country News. Grimmett received college scholarships but ultimately left school to work in oil and gas. That had its downsides, too, though.
“Just travel, travel, travel,” he said, “Always working. Never got to see your family.”
As his older relatives died and Grimmett realized he’d missed his last chance to celebrate holidays with them, he decided to return home and become a miner. Now he works a 10-minute drive from home. “That’s why I like the coal mines,” he said. “If you want to see your family, you can see your family.” He’s become “obsessed,” as he describes it, with the technical aspects of mining.
Mining industry leaders hope more young people will feel like Grimmett does. “It’s much more exciting to go and be able to operate an autonomous haul truck, for example, in a mining operation than it is to be tinkering around in a cubicle somewhere in Lehi,” Brian Sommers, president of the Utah Mining Association, said on the university panel alongside Wolverine CEO Pollastro. (Lehi is a fast-growing suburb south of Salt Lake City that the state has branded as “Silicon Slopes” to attract tech companies.)
Utah State University Eastern in Price continues to provide mining education courses. “When students come into my office looking for the location of the mining program, I don’t say that’s a bad idea,” Doug Miller, associate vice president of the campus, told High Country News.
But Miller also acknowledges that mining may not be a lasting career for young people. “They’re going to come in and work at a mine that the long-term viability is simply not going to resonate the same way that it does for those folks that have been working in a mine for 25 years,” Miller said.
At the Skyline Mine, longtime miner Simms estimates that 70% of his coworkers are “blue hats” — miners with less than a year’s experience. He sometimes asks his young crew members what they plan to do in 10 years. They often say that they expect to still be working in the mines, he said.
“I hate to tell you this,” Simms tells them, “but I’m 49 years old, almost 50, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to retire a coal miner.”
WITHIN A YEAR, Simms thinks he’ll be out of mining. He has paid off his house and sees other work options, such as Intermountain Electronics, a major manufacturing business in Carbon County, which used to build equipment for the coal industry. Now, it has diversified to renewables, oil and gas, data centers and more.
Simms is also worn out; he needs knee and shoulder replacements, for example. This year, he had to take six weeks off to get injections in his knees so he can continue walking 12 to 16 miles per shift. Simms is a fire boss, a job that involves inspecting areas of a mine, such as conveyor belt lines and haulage equipment and recording whether operations are safe. During his time off, Wolverine paid him short-term disability, but only 60% of his usual salary. Three or four years ago, he said, Wolverine’s short-term disability offered full pay. “(The benefits) are nothing like they used to be,” he told High Country News.
Previously, Simms was part of the United Mine Workers of America. In the union mines, Simms said, health care was fully covered, and he was guaranteed a pension. Non-union mines like Wolverine’s Skyline used to compete with union mines for workers, but all the union mines in Utah have shuttered. “Now there’s no competition,” Simms said, “so they can drop (disability insurance) down to 60% and no one cares.”
Some former union mines may eventually reopen, but it will be with new names, new owners and no union contracts. Mijin Cha, a just transition researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told High Country News that this is a common trend across the nation. Wolverine’s Fossil Rock Mine was previously called Trail Mountain, and it was operated by PacifiCorp’s Energy West Mining Company, which had a contract with the UMWA. The mine closed in 2001, though, and Fossil Rock Resources, a subsidiary of Wolverine, acquired it in 2015. When the mine reopened this year, its workforce was no longer unionized.
Even though there are no longer any union mines in Utah, the UMWA for the Western region is still headquartered in Carbon County, where a vibrant labor-organizing movement once existed.
“(The benefits) are nothing like they used to be.”
“My phone rings off the hook,” said Dalpiaz, head of the Western district of the UMWA, who was a miner throughout the 1970s before he began working for the union. Companies call him to find workers, and miners call when employers take away vacation, cut pay, change medical plans. But Dalpiaz said there’s nothing he can do for them without a union contract.
The UMWA began organizing miners in Utah’s Coal Country in the early 1900s, but companies refused to recognize the union until Congress passed the National Relations Labor Act in 1935. Miners faced harsh working conditions, from racism and wage theft to safety and health issues. Once they had a union and could bargain, however, the UMWA secured stronger safety standards, as well as better pay and benefits like health insurance and pensions. Non-union mines had to improve working conditions to compete, and mining became a well-paying job that could support a family.
“We set the standard of living for the entire United States of America and the world,” Dalpiaz told High Country News.
Twenty-five years ago, Dalpiaz saw the coal industry going down a “slippery slope,” as coal mines closed and union density eroded.
Then politics began to shift. “When I was growing up, you could not get a Republican elected in this entire area,” Simms told High Country News. “If somebody threw a Democrat color on their sign, guess what? They won the election. Now it’s just the opposite.”
In 1960, 67% of Carbon County voted Democrat — the highest percentage of any county in Utah. But as Democratic leaders increasingly regulated coal emissions to mitigate climate change, miners came to view the party as anti-coal and a threat to their livelihood. By the 2012 presidential election, voting trends finally flipped, and the county went 67% for Mitt Romney.
Meanwhile, Wolverine and other mining companies continue to host job fairs and constantly advertise positions on their Facebook pages to try to find miners.
As for Simms, he’s adamant that his children won’t be going into the mines. He said that legacy ends with him.
Reporting for this project was supported by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative Journalism Fellowship.
