In Texas, a coal mine opens to power Mexico
The coal industry is struggling as cheaper and cleaner natural gas undercuts coal, and environmental regulations push utilities to shut down their older coal-burning plants.
Yet new coal mines open and others expand. In one Texas county on the Mexican border, local officials and residents seem nearly united in their opposition to a new coal strip mine, the Eagle Pass Mine. The company that owns it, Dos Republicas Coal Partnership, says it intends to ship out the first load of coal by train next month.
The Dos Republicas Coal Partnership owns the Eagle Pass Mine.
Dos Republicas is backed, through layered ownership, by a major Mexican steel and coal firm, Altos Hornos de Mexico, S.A. All the coal from the Eagle Pass Mine is bound for Mexico. It will fire the Carbon I and II power plants half an hour south of the border in Nava, in the state of Coahuila.
“The excuse is that ‘we need energy,’” says Martha Bowles Baxter, a resident of Eagle Pass who opposes the mining plans. “Well, the energy is going to Mexico.”
It appears to be the first time a coal mine has been opened in the United States to serve a power plant in Latin America.
George Baxter, her husband and a civil engineer, says the smoke from the generating station in Mexico often drifts north to Eagle Pass.
“You see the brown line, horizontal line of pollution,” he says. “It extends as far as the eye can see.”
Now, he says, those results of burning coal will be added to the insults of mining it.
“Apparently the war on coal does not extend to Maverick County,” he says.
The Baxters’ chief preoccupations are widely shared. The local school district, city council and hospital officials oppose the mine. Many concerns focus on water. The Eagle Pass Mine intends to discharge into Elm Creek, which runs through the mine just before it joins the Rio Grande. Less than a mile downstream, the city of Eagle Pass takes its drinking water.
Elm Creek neighborhood residents fear that floods, like this one in 2013, will carry mine silt and waste from the Eagle Pass mine on either side of the creek. (Permission to reprint granted by Eagle Pass Business Journal)
Events in recent months have heightened a second water concern. The Eagle Pass area has had two 100-year floods in two years, according to David Saucedo, the Maverick County flood plain administrator.
“In 2013, we had 16 inches of rain in a 24-hour period,” he says. “In 2014, we had 12 inches in a 24-hour period.”
One hundred and twenty houses were damaged or destroyed.
“You have seen these people go through these things,” says Saucedo, who is also the Maverick County judge. “And on top of those floods, now you have to worry what is in the water? It weighs on you.”
The chance of two 100-year floods occurring back to back is one in 10,000. Texas mining regulations require that the ponds that collect heavy rains before they carry silt into the creek be dug deep enough to withstand just a 10-year flood.
Flood maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency indicate an official flood zone along the creek where it runs through the mine, so Saucedo opposed the mine’s flood permit. The company sued him. A lower court judge agreed he acted within his authority and that case is at the state’s 13th Court of Appeals in Corpus Christi.
In the course of those arguments, the mine has gone from paper to reality. Sixty million dollars worth of equipment has arrived at the site, hundreds of acres have been excavated and offices and parking lots for workers carved into the mesquite.
Yet Martha Bowles Baxter believes another flood, this time carrying mud or mine waste, is inevitable, and that many homes will be in the path of the water. The local newspaper refers to the area directly adjoining the mine as “densely populated.”
“When FEMA comes in, they are going to render all of that land completely contaminated,” she says. “And those people are going to be losing all their homesteads, what they plan to give their children. And no one cares because this area is very, very poor and Hispanic.”
Some residents of Eagle Pass, Texas, note that residents living near mines on the Mexican side of the border complain of soot and land settling, which causes cracks in dwellings. This banner, from Palaú, Coahuila, Mexico, accuses mine owners of assuring their own future at the expense of local children. Alonso Ancira (his last name is misspelled above) is a principal investor in the Mexican and the new Texas mines.
Rudy Rodriguez, who represents the mine owners, says not all of the mine area is in the flood plain, and engineered ponds at the mine will actually ameliorate flooding. The mine plan also complies with numerous agencies’ requirements and all state and federal law, he says.
Already, Rodriguez says, hard-hit Maverick County is benefiting from the tens of millions of dollars the mine has spent on equipment. At the mine, he points to a mechanic changing a tire on a truck so large it makes his Cadillac Escalade look like a Matchbox car. The tire alone cost $35,000, he says. Under the current footprint of the mine, which the owners seek to expand, it would inject more than $147 million into the local and regional economy.
By one measure, the project has been popular: It held a fair to connect with local vendors and would-be employees.
“We started at eight o’clock in the morning and went on in the evening,” Rodriguez says. “We had so many people want jobs — 680 applicants for 100 jobs.”
Saucedo says most of the town would rather see retail employment. Eight thousand people signed a petition against the coal mine, he says.
“To put that in perspective, you had 5,500 people come out to vote in the last election,” he says. “Now, when you have more people signing a petition than going out to vote, that should send a message.”
On Aug. 10, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers held a hearing in Eagle Pass to gather public comment, following a request by Dos Republicas to add 25,000 acres of potential mine area to its existing 6,346 acres. According to the Eagle Pass Business Journal, all 28 people who testified, including Eagle Pass Mayor Ramsey English Cantú, spoke against the mine and its expansion.
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