"This process enables us to strengthen liquidity and reduce debt, build upon the significant operational achievements we've made in recent years and lay the foundation for long-term stability and success in the future," Peabody Chief Executive Officer Glenn Kellow said in a statement.

Shares of Peabody, whose stock trades under the symbol BTU — which is also a basic unit of energy, the British thermal unit — closed Tuesday at $2.06, leaving the company's market capitalization at a measly $38 million. Shares have plunged more than 99 percent from their 2008 peak and from where they stood just five years ago. Dividend payouts to shareholders were halted in July 2015.

As a Peabody historical retrospective noted, Francis Peabody, its founder, began selling coal from the back of a mule-drawn wagon in Chicago in 1883. He opened Peabody's first mine a few years later.

The company survived the Great Depression and notes that its coal fueled not only U.S. life in World Wars I and II but a historic Antarctic exploration by Richard Byrd in 1939. It was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1949 and became the world's largest publicly held coal company amid the oil embargo of the 1970s.