$20 Million Coal Facility Opens In Clearfield County

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.

October 23, 2012 | 1:16 PM

A new $20 million coal cleaning operation is opening its doors in Clearfield County. WJAC reports the plant will ultimately employ around 20 people:

The new plant sits on a 50-acre site and will utilize water from Clearfield creek. The creek will assist with cleaning mid-vol bituminous coal that is mined into a higher quality coal. The refined coal (metallurgical and steam) will be sold both domestically and overseas, officials said.
The plant will clean approximately 3,000 tons of raw coal per day. It will then be fed to the plant by a conveyor system and cleaned before exiting the plant to be either trucked or railed away, officials said.
Company officials said that the plant will reduce the ash from 15 percent down to 8 percent. It will also decrease sulfur from 2 percent down to 1 percent.