FREEPORT — It takes coal miners 25 minutes to travel a cramped, gray-ribbed path from the hillside’s mouth down to its belly.

A black wall of coal awaits.

Seated on the ground next to a mining machine, Matt Beaver presses the controls of a shoebox-size remote, sending rows of toothed gears to gnash and chew into the wall.

The ceiling here is claustrophobic, a little more than four feet high. Beaver and the other miners must work from their knees, protected by thick plastic kneepads.

“To me, this is normal,” he said. “Not too many people can do it. It takes a special breed of person.”

Beaver, 37, is one of about a dozen miners at the Rosebud Mining Co. mine near Freeport.

They watch chunks of coal flow onto a conveyor belt and out of sight. In this, they see more than fuel.

The coal industry employed their fathers, uncles and grandfathers. Now that they are in the mines, it puts food on their tables. But in the past decade, that dependable family trade has become precarious.

Communities such as Freeport — a Harrison County village of about 400 — have put their faith in President Donald Trump’s vow to bring back coal country.

>> VIDEO: Coal miners in eastern Ohio discuss their jobs, their lives

The industry has languished largely because of a shift to natural gas as the preferred fuel for new power plants. Also, automation has made it possible for mines to operate with fewer workers. This is in addition to long-term concerns about coal's role as a contributor to climate change and as a polluter of air and water.

Trump has promised to roll back costly environmental regulations, but it’s unclear whether policy changes can save the coal industry from profound shifts in the energy market.

In 2015, the most recent year for which numbers are available, Ohio coal sales fell by almost a third from the prior year and dipped below $1 billion for the first time in eight years.

Miners represent just a fraction of 1 percent of the Ohio workforce. Coal companies employed 2,416 miners in the state in 2015, the most-recent number available, down 23 percent from 2009.

For some perspective, the state has more than 95,000 workers in auto, truck and related parts manufacturing. And Ohio’s 2,825 florists outnumber the state’s coal miners, according to figures from the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But for the Rosebud miners, it’s not just a job. It’s a legacy. And they share the hope that the new administration will fight to save their way of life.

Vanishing security

The first and only shift at the Freeport mine starts at 7 a.m., as the small crew savors a last few moments of wide-open space.

Then the workers climb into a "mantrip," a vehicle that requires them to lie on their backs and sides. The sled-like electric car shuttles them through a maze of dark and narrow passages to that day’s work site. They will not re-emerge from the ground until late in the afternoon.

The mine stays a chilly 50 degrees whether it is summer or winter. Its walls creak with the sound of excreting moisture. The air smells of the gray limestone spray that workers apply to the walls and ceilings to hold back dust.

These are jobs that pay above the norm. The average U.S. coal miner earned $25.87 per hour, or $57,820 per year, according to federal workforce data from 2015. That includes managers, electricians and other specialists.

As recently as last year, Rosebud employed about 50 people at the site, and it has capacity for more than that. The company opened the mine in 2012.

The mining workforce is down largely because of cuts in orders from electricity generators, which have shut down more than 100 coal-fired power plants nationwide since 2010, according to the Energy Information Administration.

In these unstable times, Beaver thinks of his family’s coal-mining roots and wears his late father’s antique mining helmet while he works.

“It’s provided a great life for me and my family. … For the past 20 years, I’ve been able to say I’ve never been laid off. Now it’s a little scary,” said Beaver, who has three sons, ages 10, 12 and 15. “I thought I’d never have to worry about it.”

Beaver’s father knew what it meant to be laid off, but he quickly found another mining job. These days, that’s not much of a backup plan.

“The past eight years has really thinned out the weak and the wasteful,” Beaver said of coal companies. “If you’re not efficient … you won’t survive.”

At odds with experts

If the miners are looking for reasons to be optimistic, they shouldn't speak to most of the economists, analysts and business leaders who follow the energy markets.

“I don’t expect the coal industry to come back in a large way,” said Chuck McConnell, executive director of an energy and environment initiative at Rice University in Houston. Before that, he worked on “clean-coal” technology research for Battelle in Columbus and was an assistant secretary of energy in the Obama administration.

This is more than just academic for McConnell. He was raised in coal country, near Steubenville, and spent high school summers working at a coal-fired power plant.

He sees one main culprit in coal’s decline: inexpensive natural gas from U.S. shale formations. Other factors, including federal environmental rules, play a role, he said, but a much smaller one.

Previously, electricity utilities saw gas as a cleaner, less labor-intensive option — but one that was much more expensive than coal. No longer.

“We will largely be driven by natural-gas generation for power over the next 50 years,” McConnell said.

Right now, nine gas-fired power plants are under construction or in some phase of development in Ohio. No new coal plants are in the works, and several others are likely to be shut down because of old age and high costs.

Almost nobody is as active in this market as Bill Siderewicz, president of Clean Energy Future, the Boston-based company behind five of the new Ohio plants.

When asked why he chooses gas over coal, Siderewicz scribbled numbers on a blank sheet of paper.

The upshot: It costs a new gas plant $18.20 to produce a megawatt-hour of electricity, while an existing coal-fired plant requires $33.90. A typical U.S. household uses 0.9 megawatt-hours in a month.

But coal advocates have a drastically different view of the energy math.

“Give us a level playing field and we can compete with gas all day long,” said Robert Murray, CEO of Murray Energy in St. Clairsville, which by some measures is the country's largest coal producer. Rosebud Mining is a Pennsylvania-based competitor of Murray Energy.

He argues that natural-gas prices are artificially low in part because the Obama administration was slow to approve plans for gas pipelines and export terminals, keeping supply high and prices low in the U.S. He expects this to change under Trump, who could help to increase gas prices.

That, along with a pullback on environmental rules, would go a long way toward solving the cost imbalance between gas and coal, he said.

“Get the government out of picking winners and losers,” Murray said.

Ups and downs common

Framed by the wooded hills that make up this part of Ohio’s Appalachian region, a winding road connects the Rosebud mine to the village of Freeport.

The village’s history is marked by a procession of economic births, deaths and resurrections.

Kathy Hyde has lived it and is doing her best to build something that can endure.

“I know firsthand it's drastic to the families,” said Hyde, a full-time nurse and co-owner of the Raider, one of Freeport’s few restaurants. “There's no security in the natural-resources industry, I realize that. It’s going to go up and down."

Since the early 1960s, barber Charlie Bardall has observed Freeport’s booms and busts from his spot behind a styling chair.

He grew up on a nearby dairy farm and graduated from Freeport High School in 1961. It was the school’s last class before it closed and students moved to Lakeland High School, a consolidated school with a building at the edge of town that also eventually closed.

He says Freeport was a farm community for most of its history. Coal mining had long been a part of eastern Ohio, but the first large underground operation near the village, Vail Mine, didn’t open until the mid-1960s.

“Barbering-wise, it was a big boost in business,” Bardall said.

The mine and its hundreds of workers helped create business for restaurants, a movie theater and other shops.

And the miners transformed local politics, tilting the Republican-dominated community toward Democrats, Bardall said.

When the mine closed in the mid-1970s, the town took a beating. Businesses shuttered. Families moved away. Among the newly unemployed miners was Hyde’s father.

“You have paychecks, then you don't,” she said.

Decades later, while the local economy was on another upswing, Hyde and her husband bought the restaurant.

The 2015 purchase came at a time when Harrison County was part of a rush to extract oil and natural gas from Utica shale, a rock formation deep in the earth and far below the coal seams.

Just like past booms, it did not last. Applications for Ohio shale oil and gas drilling permits peaked in 2014. Since then, many energy companies have pulled back on investment, discouraged by the low prices of oil and gas.

The same low prices also harm the competitiveness of local coal.

Still, residents point to some signs of hope. The major employer is Freeport Press, a magazine and catalog printer with a big plant welcoming visitors as they enter town from the south.

The Rosebud mine and the arrival of a Family Dollar store have boosted the local economy. And TJ’s Gas N Go — an ever-expanding grocery-restaurant-gas station —attracts drivers to stop and rest in Freeport.

Hyde is among the town’s optimists. She worked at the Raider — a name that salutes the Lakeland Raiders, mascot of the now-closed high school — as a teenager. She's a 1990 graduate.

Now a full-time nurse in Cadiz, Hyde runs the restaurant as a family side business in the hopes of restoring its status as a community gathering place.

“I wanted to save it,” she said.

New president, new hope

If you meet Norman Fox, call him Foxy.

He has rarely shaved since the 1950s, with a long white beard to prove it. He wears overalls and listens to Johnny Cash while he works. He brims with such energy that it’s a surprise to learn he is sick with a kind of blood cancer.

Fox, 80, has always lived in eastern Ohio, which he now proudly declares as Trump country.

He spends most days at Crossroads Hardware, the business he owns with his wife, Shirleyann. Around the time the couple eloped as teenagers, Fox began his career as a coal-mine electrician. He later worked at the first Vail Mine.

“We put out coal pretty much around the clock,” he said.

A heart attack forced him to retire decades ago. Managing the hardware store’s floor-to-ceiling, 16,000-item inventory is the latest of several ventures for the restless retiree.

“I worked hard all my life,” Fox said. “I always worked 10, 12 hours a day, six, seven days a week. Always had a hard job.”

Fox is also a member of the village council. Among the issues on its agenda: Freeport lacks a sewer system, which has led to a moratorium on new construction. Fox hopes the village, county and state can come up with a solution.

And, he wants to see hiring in the coal mines.

“It upsets me that we’ve got 600 years of mineable coal in the United States,” he said. “And they’re going to (increase) our electric bills so they can burn gas. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Coal advocates echo his comment about increases in electricity bills. They look back to a time when Ohio relied more on coal and had some of the country’s lowest electricity prices. Today, Ohio prices are about average.

Fox is also not alone in his distaste for what he sees as burdensome regulations.

The coal industry would, indeed, be a bit better off without certain environmental rules, according to a 2016 analysis by the Energy Information Administration.

But relief would be temporary. For example, if the new administration repealed the Clean Power Plan — President Barack Obama’s policy to reduce carbon emissions that are said to contribute to global warming — coal production would briefly rise before facing a long-term decline, the report said.

Jeremy Richardson, a senior energy analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said he’s not confident that a policy lever exists to bring back mining jobs.

Richardson was raised in West Virginia, and his father and brother have worked in the mines. With this background, he understands that mining communities take personally the headwinds facing the coal industry.

“Coal is not just an economic driver, it’s an identity,” he said. “Talking to coal miners about climate change and air pollution is a little bit like someone bursting into my living room and saying, ‘Jeremy, your identity as a scientist is destroying the planet.’”

That is a difficult conversation, but a necessary one, said Mark Partridge, an Ohio State University economist who studies coal communities.

“They cling to what they did 50 years ago, instead of looking ahead to what’s the next big thing,” he said. “We’re not painting this picture that it’s the end of rural Appalachia. But if it continues down this road, it’s going to be really hard.”

Back at the mine, workers are placing faith in Trump.

Trump won 70 percent of the vote in Harrison County. This was a contrast from the 2008 election, when Democrat Obama lost the county only narrowly, and in 1992 and 1996, when Democrat Bill Clinton won here.

Rosebud miner Sean Huston believes in Trump. He doesn't know if the president can save the industry, but he is certain Trump will give it his best shot.

Huston comes from three generations of miners. It takes him five minutes to wash the coal dust from his beard at the end of his shift. His knees ache every night when he comes home to his wife, two daughters and two sons.

“It’s worth it for your family," Huston said. "Go, Donald. Save us."

On a recent Friday afternoon, Beaver emerged from the mine in a mantrip. At his locker, he swapped a coal-dust-covered jacket for a Buckeye Trail High School sweatshirt.

Straight from work, he drove more than an hour to catch his oldest son, Dylan, play in a basketball tournament game. He took a seat in the bleachers, where he got a glimpse of his son for the first time all day.

"A lot of times coal miners are gone before their kids wake up for school," he said.

That day, Beaver’s mining crew extracted 900 tons of coal. His night ended watching his son, a sophomore playing on the varsity team, score eight points in a loss for Buckeye Trail.

"I want them to have every opportunity ... to do anything and everything they can,” Beaver said. "This is what you work for."

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