Powder River Basin coal leasing prompts IG, GAO reviews

The government’s longtime practice of auctioning coal mining rights to a single bidder may have cost taxpayers as much as $28.9 billion over the past 30 years, according to an analysis to be released Monday by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a Cambridge, Mass.-based think tank.

The non-competitive nature of the federal leasing program is being reviewed by the Interior Department’s inspector general and also will be the subject of an audit by the Government Accountability Office, according to officials at the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the leasing program.

The phenomenon — in which a mining company draws up a proposed area for leasing, and the Interior Department’s BLM auctions it off to that same firm — is the rule rather than the exception in the country’s single biggest coal producing region. In the 26 coal leases the federal government has awarded in southeastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming since 1991, 22 have gone to a single bidder. In the other four instances, there were only two bidders involved.

On Thursday, the BLM will auction off the right to extract 721.2 million tons of coal from Wyoming’s North Porcupine tract in a region known as the Powder River Basin. Barring an unforeseen development, there will be one bidder for the lease: Peabody Energy, which bought the lease to mine 402 million tons on the adjacent tract in May.

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), whose April 24 letter has prompted the first GAO review of the program in three decades, said he is concerned that the bidding system has depressed leasing rights in the Powder River Basin, the way it did in the early 1980s. In 1983, the GAO concluded that the BLM auctioned off lease rights there for $100 million below their fair market value.

“There’s a long history of under-market coal sales from the Powder River Basin,” Markey said in an interview. “Mark Twain used to say, ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does tend to rhyme.’ We need to ensure that the taxpayers are not being shortchanged the way they were back in the 1980s.”

Interior and mining industry officials said the lack of competition stems from the fact that there are only four major coal companies operating in the Powder River Basin, and mining equipment is so large and expensive that firms confine themselves to one place.

“The reason why a single company sometimes bids on a tract for leasing is that the company, which already has the existing infrastructure in place, is bidding on the adjacent parcel to their existing leased parcel,” said BLM spokeswoman Megan Crandall. “It would be too expensive for a new company to come in and build.”

Crandall added that the BLM, which oversees mineral rights for nearly 700 million acres of federal land, ”strives to ensure that public coal resources are developed in a manner that is in the best interests of taxpayers and returns fair market value,” and will cooperate with both federal probes.

All four coal companies operating in the region — Peabody, Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal and Cloud Peak Energy — declined to comment, deferring questions to the National Mining Association.