US agency sues Essar Minerals for choking streams

New York: The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says coal companies owned by the Mumbai-based Essar Group, which owns coal reserves around the world, ran illegal surface mines in eastern Kentucky which choked tributaries of the Levisa Fork River with earth, rock and spoil.

The companies should restore the sites or pay for mitigation projects elsewhere, or both, the EPA said in a lawsuit filed this week in a federal court in Pikeville. According to US reports, the EPA suit also seeks damages that could, in theory, run into millions of dollars.

According to the lawsuit, Trinity Coal Corp. and its subsidiaries began mining operations on a 682-acre site in Pike County in 2005 without a Clean Water Act permit. Two years later, it began work on a 768-acre site along the Magoffin and Floyd County line again without the required federal permit. The surface mining operations at these two sites have led to debris choking more than two miles of streams, the lawsuit alleged.

[caption id=“attachment_337541” align=“alignright” width=“380” caption=“Essar Minerals acquired Trinity Coal in 2010. Reuters”] [/caption]

The Ruias-led Essar Group has inherited the problem as Trinity has been owned since 2010 by the Mumbai-based conglomerate. Its Essar Minerals division is named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

According to mining experts, in mountaintop mining, miners blast off the upper reach of a mountain to uncover coal seams, then, typically, fill excess rock into nearby hollows. In this case the hollow fills buried tributaries of the Levisa Fork River which is popular for fishing.

There has so far been no comment on the lawsuit from Essar Minerals.

The companies named in the lawsuit along with Essar Minerals and Trinity are Frasure Creek Mining, Bear Fork Resources, Falcon Resources and Prater Branch Resources.

Essar Group, controlled by billionaire brothers Shashi and Ravi Ruia, acquired Trinity Coal in 2010. The acquisition increased Essar’s US investments to $4 billion.

Essar’s acquisition of coal producer Trinity followed steps taken by other Indian power companies, such as Tata Power Co. and Reliance Power Ltd., to secure coal assets overseas in order to cater to surging power demand in India where over 75 percent of India’s power generation is coal-fired.

Trinity Coal owns and operates six mining complexes in the US states of Kentucky and West Virginia that hold 200 million tons in coal reserves in the Central Appalachian region. The reserves are split between metallurgical coal used in steel production and thermal coal used to fuel power plants.

Essar has steel-making operations in North America. It also operates power generation in India, which hasn’t been a traditional market for US thermal coal.