WAYNESBURG, Pa.—In a roadside clearing, a young man in boots, jeans, a black hoodie, and a black cap emerges from a trail to sit on a flat-topped boulder.
He is startled to see that he is not alone on this warm, overcast Easter afternoon in the woods just north of the Pennsylvania–West Virginia state line.
Between swigs from a plastic water bottle, he describes taking a two-hour hike from his home, tracking along tree lines atop hillside pastures and scouting for turkey signs. Spring hunting season is two weeks away.
People believe that turkeys are dumb, he said, but bearded toms are wily. They will sound off, gobbling in the grassy seep below his father’s farm and near the mine where he works, but they are nowhere to be seen when you are looking for them, he said.
When the young man learns that he is talking to a reporter on his own scouting mission to speak with miners, roughnecks, and steelworkers about the coal and gas industries in the Monongahela Valley, everything changes.
“Conversation over,” he said, rising abruptly. “We don’t talk to reporters.”
With that, he is gone, disappearing down the trail, looking for the birds that are everywhere but cannot be found.
“You’re an outsider to begin with ... and a reporter,“ state Rep. Bud Cook, a Republican who represents West Pike Run Township, said. ”That’s, like, a double curse on you.”
He said coal miners—all miners—“have been under attack for so many years” by critical or condescending media, so it should be no surprise that they are not opening their doors for reporters.
“It’s a very close, very closed, family relationship,” he said in the 75-mile northern meander of the Monongahela River—also known as “The Mon”—which flows from its headwaters in Morgantown, West Virginia, downriver to Pittsburgh.
Union representatives do not return calls; a mining school says it sees “no value” in an interview. The two corporations that operate the three coal mines in Greene County, 60 miles south of Pittsburgh, will address broad industry issues but will not discuss specifics.
“They leave that up to me, for the most part,” Pennsylvania Coal Alliance Executive Director Rachel Gleason said. According to her, it could be a “tall challenge” for a reporter to parachute into this big sprawl of small places.
For the thousands of coal mine employees in Greene County, it is not a good time to be speaking with wandering reporters.
It is an uncertain spring in The Mon. Despite President Donald Trump’s executive orders crafted to keep mines and coal-fired power plants open, the future, according to Cook, “is to be determined.”
Trump issued seven executive actions in early April boosting energy development.
Two of those specifically aimed to sustain the nation’s declining $28 billion coal-mining industry.
Matt Mackowiak is government affairs director for Core Natural Resources, which operates five Pennsylvania mines. He said he is “very excited” about Trump’s orders.
“This is the first time this has happened, really, that a president has issued executive orders specifically supporting the coal industry,“ he told The Epoch Times. ”So it’s kind of a historic moment.”
However, in the month since the president issued the orders, no Pennsylvania coal mining companies have altered plans and no new mine proposals—aside from proposals that have been filed and idling for years—have been filed.
“[A coal mine is] not something you just open up, right?” Gleason told The Epoch Times. “I mean, that takes years and years and years and years.”
Trump’s orders and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ prioritization of pending projects “will help things move along,” she said.
Gleason noted that “a couple of projects in Pennsylvania waiting for a decade-plus to be approved” are now being fast-tracked, including a coal prep plant.
“These are existing mines asking for additions [and] different things” such as upgrades, not new mine proposals, Gleason said.
The Mon, unusual in its northern flow, runs from West Virginia into Pennsylvania, bends west, and hooks into the Allegheny River at Pittsburgh. Its metallurgical coal fires the coke furnaces that made Pittsburgh the headwaters of Midwest industrialization.
“We’re really blessed to have very high-quality metallurgical coal in Pennsylvania,” Gleason said. “There’s not a lot of it in the United States, so we have some pretty valuable coal seams.”
Whether that trend will continue depends on what Trump decides about the proposed $14.1 billion Nippon Steel acquisition of U.S. Steel.
Coal Innovation, Not Elimination
Before leaving office in January, President Joe Biden prohibited the acquisition, prompting lawsuits from both parties.Trump also opposes the sale, but on April 7, he directed the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to reevaluate it by late May.
How the president rules on the pending merger will affect southwest Pennsylvania’s coal-mining industry profoundly.
The area has ample “thermal coal” for electricity, Gleason said, but “bad decisions” by legislators in states such as Maryland preclude the use of coal for power.
Meanwhile, utilities and regional transmission operator PJM Interconnection is doubling down on replacing coal with natural gas.
That is evident even in southwest Pennsylvania, where retired coal-fired power plants—including one in New Hope, east of Pittsburgh—are being converted into natural gas-fired data center hubs. Others, including one in Monaca, are being used as laboratories for programs such as NiSource’s Columbia Gas multi-phase hydrogen blending project.
Mackowiak said Trump’s efforts could help Core expand exports—its biggest market—and help maintain “business as usual” for Pennsylvania mines.
Based in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, Core Natural Resources was formed from the January merger of CONSOL Energy’s Pennsylvania coal mines and Arch Resources’ mines in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and West Virginia.
The corporation operates 11 mines, with five in southwest Pennsylvania. Most notable of those is the three-mine Pennsylvania Mining Complex, which employs more than 2,500 workers and includes the nation’s largest underground coal mine, the Bailey Mine in Greene County.
“Coal is going to be around for a long time,” Mackowiak said. “We need to focus on coal innovation, not elimination.”
Retaining coal markets can sustain mining, but it will never generate the direct jobs that it once did—not because of air emissions regulations or boom-and-bust upheaval, but because of the inexorable evolution of automation.
Decades ago, hundreds of miners were needed to excavate in a labor-intensive, dangerous profession of skilled specialties.
Today, just dozens of workers are needed to operate a coal mine.
And while Mackowiak said he sees “business as usual” for Core’s mines, perhaps even expansion in coal exports, there is no such assurance for the 700 workers—including 550 miners—employed in Greene County’s other mine, the Cumberland Mine and Prep Plant south of Waynesburg.
When it purchased Cumberland in 2020, Iron Senergy, which did not respond to emails or calls, also inherited the Emerald Mine in Greene County, which was shuttered in 2015.
The Emerald closure and Dana Mining’s 2018 shutdown of the 4 West Mine near Mount Morris, Pennsylvania, put more than half the county’s miners out of work forever. The memory is painfully fresh, not only for the miners, but also for their families and for communities up and down The Mon.
And that, Cook said, “is the story, the bigger story, to be told here.”
The ‘Bigger Story’
Pennsylvania’s rural population “is declining at a rate faster than projected,” according to a July 2024 report from the Center for Rural Pennsylvania.
The state has lost nearly 1 percent of rural residents in less than three years. It is a national trend; 82 percent of counties defined as “rural” have fewer people today than in 2020, according to the Census Bureau.
The bureau said the 65-and-older cadre is Greene County’s fastest-growing group, increasing from 15 percent to 21 percent between 2010 and 2022.
Cook grew up in Washington County, 40 miles upriver from Pittsburgh. He graduated from California Area High School in 1974.
California, Pennsylvania, is a shell of its former self, he said. It has lost 5.6 percent of its residents since 2020, according to USAFacts.
A four-term Pennsylvania House incumbent, the 68-year-old Cook was reshuffled into a newly configured 50th House District in 2020 because of population shifts.
“We lost 10,000 constituents over a 10-year period” between 2010 and 2020, he said.
He described the exodus as an existential threat to the industries that have sustained families for generations in The Mon.
Cook said many Mon Valley coal miners, steelworkers, coke plant machinists, and railroad workers are from farm-owning families “going back six generations.”
But as mining and farming become less labor-intensive, there are fewer nearby industrial jobs to sustain the “very tight family, community-knit” ambiance of the region, he said.
But Mackowiak said there are mine vacancies and good local jobs in subsidiary businesses that support mining.
According to him, The Mon offers an array of jobs for “a talent pool that ranges from a GED up to people that have master’s degrees.”
“In the mines, we have an extremely diverse group of people, people that were former teachers,” he said.
The average salary for a Pennsylvania underground coal miner is $111,000.
“That’s just baseline,” Mackowiak said. “That’s a pretty significant salary nowadays.”
But there will never be as many coal-mining jobs as there once were, and the industry remains reliant on a boom-and-bust cycle dictated by markets.
It is a history that has plagued The Mon for years and is accelerating its population decline.
Marcellus Shale Coalition President Jim Welty said his organization’s 140 natural gas producers, which operate 70,000 wells statewide, want to avoid boom and bust. They hope to thwart population decline by building a workforce to reestablish The Mon as the engine of U.S. industry.
Like coal, most Pennsylvania gas is exported. However, the state’s future lies not in exporting energy, but in using it, Welty told The Epoch Times.
“We’re focused on using the gas here in Pennsylvania,” he said of the state’s $42 billion gas industry, which directly employs about 125,000 workers—far more than the number employed by the coal industry.
“We'd rather be taking advantage of those economic opportunities and the jobs that go with it right here than having them sent elsewhere, because the product is right here under our feet.”
Cook agreed.
“We’ve got to quit selling what we don’t have and begin selling what we do have in southwest Pennsylvania,“ he said, noting that it has “the best of all worlds.”
“Anything you wanted to do, I swear, you could do in the five-county region of southwest Pennsylvania,” Cook said.
“The cultural opportunities in Pittsburgh are unbelievable.”
And, he said, less than an hour’s drive south in Greene County, people can “enjoy the outdoors.”
“You [can] fish, hunt, bike, all that stuff,“ he said. ”And with the accessibility to the internet, ‘here’ does not mean ‘here’ anymore.”
Going forward, that will play an important role in drawing young families back to The Mon, according to Cook.
“Our challenge is how do we get, and keep, our young people home?” he said.
