Coal mining in distress? Not to this Fishers startup
15 March 2019 6:00 PM IST
American Resources Corp., formed in 2015, specializes in buying distressed coal assets from struggling or bankrupt coal operators.
- American Resources Corp. owns five coal mines, including the Access Energy Mine in Kentucky, which feeds the company’s Mill Creek coal preparation plant, shown above, in Letcher County, Kentucky.
- American Resources Corp., formed in 2015, specializes in buying distressed coal assets from struggling or bankrupt coal operators.
- The company has just 230 employees (and another 70 contract workers), compared to more than 7,000 employees at Peabody Energy, based in St. Louis, one of the largest U.S. coal companies, which struggled under billions of dollars in debt before filing for bankruptcy in 2016.
- While most coal companies mine coal chiefly for power plants, which burn it to generate electricity, American Resources mines mostly metallurgical coal, a more profitable type, which is melted down into coke and combined with iron ore to make steel.
- They began buying selected assets out of bankruptcy sales and from distressed operators, and put them together under a holding company called Quest Energy.
- By late 2016, the company was producing coal at its first mine, and began building a network with a hub-and-spoke model, allowing nearby mines to share expensive processing equipment, holding down costs.
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