Closing Down a Coal Mine (PCX, BTU)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Coal_imageLast Friday, Patriot Coal Corporation (NYSE:PCX) announced that it would close its Jupiter mine in March. The company had said in September that it planned to close the West Virginia mine, so the announcement was not unexpected.

Jupiter employs about 100 miners and produces coal used for electricitygeneration. In October 2007, the Army Corps of Engineers was enjoinedfrom issuing Patriot a permit to construct a fill to hold waste from asurface mine, which caused Jupiter to quit surface mining at the site.In 2007, Jupiter produced 1.5 million tons of thermal coal, about 10%of Patriot’s total production from its Appalachian sector.

Patriot Coal is a spin-off of Peabody Energy Corporation (NYSE:BTU) andbecame a separate publicly traded company in November 2007. The stockis trading about 71% below its 52-week high and is off about 5% thismorning, at $25.80/share.

Paul Ausick
January 12, 2009

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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