Blaming Weak Market, Consol Scales Back Production At West Virginia Coal Mine

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

February 29, 2012 | 11:34 AM

A weak market for coal is forcing Pennsylvania-based Consol to decrease production in a West Virginia mine, as the AP reports:

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Consol Energy is scaling back operations at a northern West Virginia coal mine because of low market demand.Pennsylvania-based Consol said Tuesday that it will idle some of the Blacksville No. 2 mine and reduce the schedule for its continuous mining operation to four days a week.

The mine employs 585 people. No workers will be laid off.

Consol says most overtime and other non-essential work will be postponed until normal operations resume. When that might happen is unclear.
Consol says the coal market is weak because of the mild winter and low natural gas prices.