Coal, cleaned of rock debris and dust, moves along an industrial-grade conveyor belt before it is piled for transport at the Century Mine in Belmont County in southeast Ohio. The finished coal then moves on another conveyor line down to railroad trains that transport it to the Powhatan Transfer Center in Powhatan Point, Ohio, on the Ohio River and then into waiting barges for delivery to power plants. (Chuck Crow/Plain Dealer)

John Funk and Chuck Crow, The Plain Dealer

Will coal, and its jobs, ever come back?

ST. CLAIRSVILLE, Ohio - President Donald Trump's vow to put coal miners back to work is more than a campaign slogan in this Ohio River Valley town of 5,000, where coal and steel jobs once were plentiful.

Last June, Trump drew more than 4,000 people to a rally at Ohio University's Eastern Campus in St. Clairsville. In November, he won Belmont County by nearly 42 percentage points.

St. Clairsville is the county seat of Belmont County, a sparsely populated (68,673) rural county with very little organized farming. Industrial culture dominates here, as much as in Youngstown or Pittsburgh. It is rich in coal and natural gas reserves, which helped fuel industry over the past 100 years.

People here are hoping not just for the return of coal mining jobs, which have fallen below 400 in the county. They are longing for an industrial renaissance, which Trump has all but promised.

They may get at least the start of one. But it probably won't be based on coal.

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PTT's plant in Thailand (PTT Global Chemical)

Hopes for an industrial future

The region's current biggest hope is based on the cheap, abundant natural gas produced by fracking.

PTT Global Chemical Public Company of Thailand is looking to build a multi-billion-dollar petrochemical refinery about 25 minutes northwest of St. Clairsville, in Dillies Bottom, just across the Ohio river from Wheeling, West Virginia.

PTT has put off a final decision on the project until the end of this year.

The ethane "cracker" would convert ethane flowing from shale gas wells into polyethylene, the basic feed stock for the plastic industry

Building a cracker in St. Clairsville would create 6,000 to 7,000 construction jobs and 600 to 700 permanent jobs, which in turn would support other employment, said Steve Hill, the county's liaison to the oil and gas industry. Plastics manufacturers, for instance, might choose to build nearby.

The county has been working to land such a project for years, said Larry Merry, executive director of the Belmont County Port Authority. Shell Chemical considered the site, he said, but chose a location in Pennsylvania, near Youngstown.

If the cracker is built, coal’s role will be purely historical. Part of the site was home to the R.E. Burger power plant, which was fueled by coal. It was demolished last July.

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"When you talk about the coal industry you are talking about families," said J.B. Holliday, supervisor at the Powhatan Transfer Center, a coal depot which uses fast-moving conveyor belts to load Ohio River barges with coal it has received minutes before by rail and truck from a nearby mine. Behind Holliday, on the West Virginia side of the river is American Electric Power's old Kammer power plant, which closed in 2015, and in the distance Kentucky Power's Mitchel power plant. (Chuck Crow/The Plain Dealer)

What is killing coal?

The county once contained seven working mines. Today there is only one, Century mine.

Coal employment also has fallen, across all of Ohio. In 2013, there were nearly 3,000 coal miners in Ohio, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. By 2015, there were about 2,352.

People here blame coal's demise and the region's overall industrial decline on government "over-regulation," which they blame on Democrats. They say: Federal subsidies for wind and solar farms are wrong-headed and not pro-job. Climate change is a distant issue. Good-paying jobs are the issue.

"Forty years ago, you could get a job almost anywhere. The Valley was home to steel, coal and the chemical industry," said Dave Humphreys, Sr., a former coal employee who founded a metal fabricating company, Lion Industries, 22 years ago in nearby Bellaire, Ohio.

Lion supplies coal mines with stamped steel parts. In recent years, Humphreys has had to lay off workers for the first time ever, as power plants began closing and coal production slowed across the region.

"What people don't understand is that the economy here has been based on coal. Obama said he would regulate coal out of business. He practically did. I don't think politicians really understand the effect of regulations on business and on people. We need sensible regulations."

Energy market analysts, however, say coal has suffered mostly because other forms of electrical generation, including wind and solar, are cheaper than coal. Natural gas has been especially cheap in the Ohio-Pennsylvania-West Virginia region, and, like coal, it can power plants around the clock.

Coal also burns dirtier than natural gas. It releases far more carbon dioxide, and the vast weight of scientific consensus says that CO2 is a key contributor to global warming. Coal also releases pollutants like mercury.

Democrats also have noted for years that the solar industry employs more American workers than do coal mines. In January, a U.S. Department of Energy report on generation and fuels employment said solar supported 373,807 jobs, while coal supported 86,035.

If there’s any debate about the wisdom of tighter regulation, though, there’s no question that it caused real pain in this part of Ohio.

J. B. Holliday, manager of American Coal Sales Company's Powhatan Transfer Center, can look across the river to the old Kammer Power Plant. It was just one of nine facilities that American Electric Power closed in 2015, rather than add pollution controls

"Kammer is a casualty of the Obama Administration," said Holliday.

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Pennsylvania-based Rice Energy is drilling three horizontal gas wells this month in the Utica shale deep under Warnock, Ohio, near St. Clairsville. Existing wells at the site are already sending gas through a 16-inch line to a processing plant where it is cleaned. The average length of the company's horizontal wells in the county is more than 13,000 feet. (Chuck Crow/The Plain Dealer)

Jobs from gas, for now

If natural gas has been killing coal, it has also been creating new jobs here, though nowhere near as many as coal and the old industries did.

There are 261 shale gas wells producing in Belmont County and another 32 are being drilled, said Mike Chadsey, spokesman for the Ohio Oil and Gas Association.

Chris Smith, a production superintendent for Pennsylvania-based Rice Energy, supervises a crew of employees stationed at the company's 47 wells in Belmont County. A 19-year industry veteran who has lived in many small Ohio towns working for traditional drilling and mining companies, Hill said he is finally working close to his wife and children in St. Clairsville.

Rice Energy, which is just one of nine gas producers working in Belmont County, has budgeted a little over $1 billion for drilling and completion of gas wells this year there and two western Pennsylvanian counties, said spokeswoman Kimberly Price.

About $450 million of that money will be spent in Belmont County, she said. The company has 508 full-time employees and currently has openings for another 29, she added.

The networks of pipes needed to connect wells to gas lines also spurs employment, at least temporarily. But once the construction is completed, the very efficiency of gas operations is a threat to future employment. It takes only a few employees to monitor the high-tech metering, cleaning and "de-watering" equipment installed on huge concrete well pads.

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The highly automated Century Mine in Belmont County produces more than 5 million tons of coal annually, using long-wall mining equipment and a system of industrial-grade conveyor belts which bring the coal to the surface, left, separates rock fragments from coal, center blue building, and moves it to piles on the right. From there another conveyor system moves most of the clean coal to waiting rail "hopper" cars and some to large dump trucks. The terraced mountain of rock debris, background, will be grassed. The American Energy Corp., a Murray Energy Corp. subsidiary, owns and operates the mine. (Chuck Crow/The Plain Dealer)

A cloudy future for coal

Even Robert Murray, a strong Trump supporter and president and CEO of St. Clairsville-based coal mining company Murray Energy Corp., is pessimistic about a return of jobs in the mines.

"Trump says coal miners are going back to work. I have asked him to temper the expectation. Some of those jobs are gone forever. You don't bring them back," he said.

His own Century Mine operation, the last mine in the county, is one good example of why. It has survived because it is the only mine in the state to use the highly efficient long-wall mining technology. Its efficiency means that it needs relatively few miners per ton of coal mined.

The long-wall mining machine at Century carves out entire rooms, grinding all of the coal out of the seam in a wide swath, continuously moving the chunks of coal and rock to the surface on 84-inch wide conveyor belts.

The Century has called back about 30 of the 200 employees it had to lay off in 2015, said Casey Crooks, mine superintendent and a 17-year employee.

Crooks said his crews work three shifts a day but now only on weekdays, producing between 5 million and 5.5 million tons of coal a year. That's considerably less than in previous years when crews brought more than 8 million tons of coal to the surface in a year.

"This is a very low margin business," Crooks said. "I doubt that coal will completely go away. But if your mine is not one of the most efficient mines in the country, you are not going to survive. There were a lot of little mines here in the past. Most went away."

Even the most efficient mines still need customers, and that could be a problem even for an operation like the Century. "I look for most of the coal-fired plants in Ohio to go," Crooks said.

Murray says the restoration of coal depends on future manufacturing growth, and on future increases in the price of natural gas.

"If President Trump can get manufacturing re-established, then coal will enjoy growth," he added, arguing that in the long run, coal power plants will be cheaper to operate than gas plants because the price of gas will increase as more gas plants are built and more gas is shipped out of the country. Most forecasters think gas prices will increase somewhat in the next 25 years but not to the point that gas turbine power plants will lose their edge over coal-fired boilers, which are inherently less efficient.

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Homes along Ohio Route 7, looking south, in Powhatan Point, Ohio, are not far from the now closed smoke stacks of American Electric Power's Kammer power plant and the still-operating Mitchell power plant, owned by AEP's subsidiary Kentucky Power. (Chuck Crow/The Plain Dealer)

The solution for some displaced workers is education

If the coal jobs are not coming back, what can sustain the community?

Edward Mowrer, operations manager of the four-year-old Energy Institute at Belmont College in St. Clairsville, says many laid off workers seek two-year associate degrees or shorter-term certificates preparing them for positions in the power, gas and oil industries.

"We offer industrial electronics technology and civil engineering technology," said Mowrer. "What I have done is tried to expand these core programs to include what gas and oil and other energy companies want."

What they want are higher-level skills. "People who can understand programmable electronic controls, satellite technology and new technologies used by civil engineers developing plans for bridges, highways and buildings."

When layoffs occurred over the past several years, the college worked with the companies and with Ohio Job and Family Services to show the newly unemployed what programs were available. These students received federal and state assistance to cover all or a portion of the tuition, though the amount depended on what caused the layoffs, said Mowrer.

After the Ormet Corp. closed its aluminum smelter in Hannibal in 2013, more than 1,000 employees lost their jobs. Belmont trained and graduated 86 of them. It is preparing to graduate former coal miners this spring.

The college has also created technology programs that tie directly into four-year degrees with Franklin University in Columbus and with state universities, including Kent State University and the University of Akron. About 10 percent of Belmont's graduates have gone on to earn four-year degrees.

About 83 percent of Belmont's 2016 graduates landed jobs in the fields they trained for, said Mowrer.

One graduate is Nathan Cencula, 26, of St. Clairsville, a strong Trump supporter who lost his coal mining job in December 2015.

Cencula will graduate in early May with an associate degree in industrial electronics technology. Recruiters have already sought him out.

He is considering offers to work in a Pennsylvania coal mine with a chance to go into management; to work for an electric utility, probably as a lineman or technician; and to be a well tender at a gas company in St. Clairsville.

"But right now I'm focusing on graduating," he said.

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Dave Humphreys, CEO of Lion Industries, in Bellaire, Ohio, on April 4, 2017. Before he owned his own companies, Humphreys worked in coal mines in West Virginia in the 1960's and 70's. (Chuck Crow/The Plain Dealer)

Trump and the politics of coal

Voters here do not condition their support for Trump on his ability to restore coal jobs. Many say they like how he aggravated both political parties during the two-year presidential campaign.

"I voted for Trump, because everybody hated him," said John Toth, a retired miner.

"The Republican Party hated Trump. The Democratic Party hated him. Corporate America hated him. I said that must be the guy for me. He ain't going to be in bed with [any of] them."

As April 29 past, Trump's 100th day in office, a wait and see attitude prevailed on questions of whether laid-off miners will get their jobs back.

"I am not sure coal will ever go back to what it used to be," said Toth, blaming not only federal clean air regulations, but also federal support of renewables such as wind and solar.

"I think if the country had put the money it spent on wind and solar into clean-coal technology, we'd be way ahead of the game," he said.

At least one study frequently cited by the coal industry concluded that every coal job created 11 other jobs, from mining supply workers to metal fabricators to truckers. Other estimates say every coal job supports four to six other jobs.

Therefore, coal's future will have economic and political consequences, said Republican U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson, whose district includes Belmont County.

"If any more coal-fired plants and mines shut down you are looking at significant increases in the unemployment rate in coal-rich counties," he said. "These Appalachian counties are at the back of everybody's mind in Columbus and even further back of everybody's mind in Washington, D.C."

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Willaim Neff, The Plain Dealer

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William Neff, The Plain Dealer

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The coal moving out of Belmont County's Century mine on the industrial-grade conveyor belt (right) accumulates in the background before returning to a sorting and washing system housed in the blue building where rock fragments and dust are removed. Another conveyor belt then moves the finished coal to a storage area and on to rail hopper cars and oversized dump trucks. (Chuck Crow/The Plain Dealer)

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