| Updated: Feb. 11, 2021, 7:46 p.m.
Coal remains king in Utah’s Emery County despite bankruptcies, shrinking demand and obstacles shipping it overseas.
The Bureau of Land Management quietly signed off on a plan to expand a Utah coal producer’s federal lease by 7.2 million tons, adding two or three years of additional production from Emery County’s Lila Canyon mine. But at the same time it shelved a proposal to issue a much larger lease to the mine’s operator, the reorganized Murray Energy Corp., which recently emerged from bankruptcy with a new name and corporate structure.
Even as mines shutter all over the United States in the face of declining demand for coal in the power sector, Lila has steadily increased its output since it went into production about a decade ago, reaching 3.7 million tons in 2019.