Who wants to buy low-quality coal?
By Lethbridge Herald on June 18, 2025.
Editor,
It happened back in the early ‘50s. That’s when the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) converted from steam power to diesel engines. Result: Alberta’s Crowsnest Pass coal lost its primary market.
Crowsnest Pass coal, ideal for powering steam engines, can’t compete economically with British Columbia in terms of suppling metallurgical coal. Mining engineers, coal mining companies, and geologists have reported this simple fact for decades.
What’s happened as a result? Crowsnest Pass coal mines closed during the following three decades due to the Elk Valley’s thicker, superior, and much more easily mined seams of metallurgical coal.
What’s changed of late to alter the economic picture? Nothing! Certainly not the geology of the Rocky Mountains.
Perhaps the CPR, in a wish to define its future by relaunching its storied past, plans to fire-up yesterday’s rusting boilers to create a steamy tomorrow offering Crowsnest Pass coal a market?
As we wait for the CPR to steam boldly into tomorrow’s sunrise, let’s celebrate quality-of-life living and the internationally revered beauty and intrigue of Alberta’s Crown of the Continent landscape. Let’s treasure and protect the headwaters of the drought-plagued Oldman Watershed and its 200,000 downstream residents.
David McIntyre
Crowsnest Pass
10-9
Well said David. My late father was a Power Plant Engineer for 38 years and was dead set against burning coal and the pollution it created. He knew natural gas was the answer. He could produce twice as much electricity using it.
People don’t realize that CPC Environment Minister, Jim Prentice said in 2010, that coal fired power plants in Canada must be decommissioned by the earlier part of this decade, because it is a major contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and reduced air quality. Jim Prentice was the last Alberta PC premier, and he wanted coal fired power plants in Alberta decommissioned for the same reasons, while wanting more solar power and more wind power for Alberta. In the 2015 provincial election in Alberta, all the political parties in Alberta were campaigning on closing down coal fired power plants in Alberta, and they were all campaigning on getting into more green energy sources.
Ralph Klein did the well over $30 billion electricity deregulation debacle, and the $10 billion Power Purchase Agreements debacle. In 2010-11, TransAlta was manipulating power prices in Alberta, and in 2015 they were found guilty and were given a $56 million fine, which they have only passed onto the power consumers in Alberta. In June of 2020, the UCP allowed power companies in Alberta to hold back the power, which increased power prices in Alberta exponentially. This is what’s known as economic witholding, and it has cost Albertans well over $100 billion since that time. In 2019, the UCP switched back to an energy only system for power, from a capacity based power system. This caused Alberta’s power blackouts in the winter and spring of 2024.
Someone who was a power engineer told me that Ralph Klein doing electricity deregulation in 1995 was a very bad thing to do. He certainly was right. Now, the UCP have cost Alberta well over $30 billion in investment with their moratorium on renewable energy for Alberta.
Peter Lougheed enacted the 1976 Coal Policy to protect the mountains, the water and the environment from harm. The UCP reversed that in an undemocratic fashion. The UCP wants to avoid paying coal mining companies nearly $4 billion, $10.8 billion and $15 billion for breaking contract agreements, and this is why Danielle Smith is flip flopping on this.
Ralph Klein reduced Alberta’s coal royalty rate to just 1%. Automation will take over most of the jobs. The mountains will be permanently damaged, and selenium will contaminate the very scarce water supply, which is needed by farmers, ranchers, people in nearby towns, and wildlife. Foreign coal mining company CEOs will walk away wealthier, while Alberta gets more problems.
Teck Mines in British Columbia has been fined multiple times for environmental protection breaches. The selenium from the coal mines in British Columbia went into the water in Montana, Idaho and in Washington State, and their governments don’t like it.
Danielle Smith has shown that she is the worst premier Alberta ever had. I thought Ralph Klein was bad, and he certainly was, but Danielle Smith has shown she is worse.
Supposedly they are looking for a specialized coal for steel making industry. They say that it’s not for traditional burning fuel for heating.
It’s always amusing to hear from an other ex-town council official who knows nothing about the mining, geologiy, mineral economics, or nature of steel making commodities.
And what is the purpose of ur post? Please share ur knowledge on mining and whether u support the Grassy Mtn project. I’m always open to hearing expert opinions on this topic.