Two-minute descent: Enlow Fork Mine tour offers rare glimpse into ‘underground city’
At the start of their shift, the coal miners working on Enlow Fork Mine’s H-3 longwall section step into a black steel elevator and descend 800 feet underground, where they walk out through a heavy airlock door and into a part of the earth that few people ever see.
It’s a two-minute trip to the bottom of the Consol Energy Inc. coal mine in Prosperity, Washington County.
The area is surprisingly well-lit, with a concrete floor, telephone, computer, and emergency supplies stored in cabinets. The mine walls near the entrance are sprayed with fire-resistant shotcrete, a cement-like material used for mines, subways, tunnels, and swimming pools.
“This is pretty much where everybody’s day starts. It’s a high-traffic area, and we try to protect it because this area, for the life of this mine, will be here, so you figure another 25 or 30 years,” said Mike Koffler, assistant supervisor at Enlow Fork Mine, who led a group of reporters on a tour of the mine on May 9.
Then, the miners load into mantrips – shuttles that carry the miners and their supplies throughout the mine on a maze of subway-like tracks – and they settle in for the half-hour ride to the section of the mine they’re working on.
There, they will spend eight-hour shifts operating shearers and other state-of-the-art equipment to cut coal from the wall. The coal travels on underground conveyor belts that come out at the surface. There, overland conveyor belts take the coal to be sorted.
All of the other underground work the miners do is to prepare for the longwalls to be mined.
“As we’re mining, it’s kind of like building a city underground. We have to have electricity, we have to have water, we have to have air going with us as we continue to mine so we can ventilate and make the environment safe underground,” said Koffler.
Mining, he noted, “is not a pick and shovel and a horse and a carriage anymore. It hasn’t been for a long time. It’s very technologically advanced, and we are continually pushing that envelope to get that technology underground and to be able to use it to help us be more efficient and productive and do it safely.”
For coal miners like Rich Burkholder, a fourth-generation miner, there is no other job they’d rather do.
“I’ve been doing this for 22 years, and I love it. My family’s been doing this for many years. My great-grandfather, my grandfather worked in the mines, different jobs,” said Burkholder. “When my father retired as a miner, they had a tour and he took me and my mom in. I saw it and I was like, ‘Hey, that’s something I’d like to do.’ I was amazed by the process. And here I am. That was 22 years ago.”
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- Rich Burkholder, a section foreman at Enlow Fork Mine, is a fourth-generation coal miner.
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- Steve Martinko on the H side longwall face at the Consol Energy Enlow Fork Mine.
Tapping more uses for coal
Consol Energy Inc., based in Canonsburg, has been a coal industry giant and one of the nation’s biggest coal producers for 160 years.
Coal accounts for 35% of the world’s total electric power supply, and worldwide electricity generation from coal hit record highs in 2023, even as its role in U.S. power generation has dwindled as natural gas and renewable power sources, including solar and wind, step up. Coal generated about 16.6% of electricity in the United States in 2023, down from 51% in 2001, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
But Consol continues to find new ways to grow.
Exports now account for 60% of Consol’s market, and shipments overseas to India and other countries – the company has shipped coal to five different continents – have helped Consol weather the challenges facing the industry.
Consol also launched Consol Innovations, a subsidiary that is looking at new markets and products made from coal, and has invested in the research and development of coal in areas such as aerospace, military, battery storage, building materials, and other high-technology applications.
“We believe there is an all-of-the-above approach to energy, whether that’s solar, natural gas, or wind. We do believe that coal plays a huge part, a vital part in the energy mix for the foreseeable future. It has to,” said Erica Fisher, Director of Consol’s Human Resources and Communications Department. “Most people don’t know the contributions of coal, past and present. When it comes to its future, we get very excited about coal’s potential for uses beyond electricity generation.”
The company also sees coal playing a significant role in developing nations that don’t have access to renewables as a primary means of power.
Consol Energy owns the Pennsylvania Mining Complex (PAMC), which includes Enlow Fork, Bailey and Harvey mines in Washington and Greene counties. The three coal mines make up the largest underground coal complex in the country, covering an area the size of Pittsburgh, and the company controls more than 1 billion tons of undeveloped reserves.
The complex also includes Itmann Mine and the Baltimore Marine terminal, one of two coal export terminals on the Eastern Seaboard with the ability to serve the largest ocean-going ships in the world.
Consol ships about 15 millions tons of coal out of Baltimore each year. Operations were temporarily interrupted by the March 26 collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, but the company found other terminals along the East Coast to move its coal.
The complex is projected to mine 28.5 million tons of coal in 2024, with Enlow Fork Mine expected to mine 9.3 million tons. And mining is projected to continue there for at least the next 25 years.
“At Enlow Fork, our reserves take us to 2050 or 2051, and we still have some more things to look at to see how much more life we can find there, so we definitely have some longevity,” said Koffler. “The quality of the coal we mine here is probably the best out of the complex.”
In 2022, there were about 43,000 coal miners in the U.S., down from an estimated 92,000 in 2011.
But Consol is bucking the trend and is ramping up its labor force to meet demand, Koffler said.
Consol is one of the top 20 employers in Washington County, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry.
Enlow Fork Mine employs 350 hourly employees and 141 salary employers, including engineers, geologists, and technical specialists. Roughly 5% of miners are women.
Safety a priority
Despite advancements, coal mining does come with inherent dangers and risks, and it’s not for everyone.
“We’ve had men and women coming to work thinking they were going to be a coal miner and as soon as they got to the bottom of the elevator they said, ‘No, this isn’t for me,'” said Koffler. “My first time underground, I was blown away. It’s definitely a different environment, but for the right person it’s a great way to earn a living.”
The average annual salary for an underground bituminous coal miner in Pennsylvania is over $104,000, and Red Hats – inexperienced miners who learn on-the-job for the first year – earn about $56,000.
“I love it. The company has provided me and my family an opportunity to live a pretty good life,” said coal miner Matt Roebuck. “Safety is at the forefront of this place. There’s misconceptions about the mine, but you come down here and look at the amount of technology that goes into it – we ride in on $250,000 mantrips every day – and people are surprised. They tell us around here the way you go in is the way we want you to come out.”
For Consol, safety is a priority, said Gaven Verbosky, safety supervisor. That includes gear. Miners wear reflective shirts and pants, and a helmet with a head lamp (there is no natural light inside the mine, and it’s pitch black when the head lamps are off), and carry a tracker and an M20 SCSR (self-contained self-rescuers), a device that provides a miner with about 10 to 15 minutes of oxygen.
Underground, several safety precautions are in place. Lifelines with directional cones and branches that lead to escape routes or to SCSR cachets run throughout the mine. At Enlow, more than 3,000 SCSRs are supplied throughout the mine.
Large yellow Rescue Alternatives – a box that looks like a shipping container – provide safe shelter for up to 92 hours for as many as 32 miners if they are unable to escape their work area in the event of an emergency.
The company also has launched Consol Energy Fire Brigade, where employees are trained to fight any type of fire.
The longwall mining process itself – where the miners dig out a panel of coal about 1,000 feet wide and two miles long – operates in a similar way that a meat slicer cuts a slab of meat. Miners use shears and electrohydraulic shields that allow the shear to tram back and forth, cutting an approximately 3-foot area.
The miners haul in roughly 2,000 tons for every three feet they advance.
So far, the miners are about one-third of the way out of H-3. The mine’s G longwall also is being mined.
A typical crew is made up of a dozen miners, including members of the fire brigade.
Last year, the company launched its Not So Fast campaign, aimed at “changing the narrative when it comes to coal mining and why it matters today and why it will continue to matter for decades to come,” said Fisher.
“The U.S. has the most abundant coal reserves in the world, so to the extent that we can develop innovative ways to use this valuable domestic resource, we will greatly mitigate our dependence on foreign nations and advance our own interests,” she said. “And we have to consider the trade-offs with a transition to renewable energy that simply can’t happen overnight.”
Koffler agrees.
“I guess, like anything, you go to light a switch, you turn it on, there’s power and you don’t really think about every day where that power’s coming from,” he said. “But for the people involved in this industry, whether we’re mining it or selling it or moving it, we understand that this product has a pretty big place in our energy mix currently and into the future.”