by Matt Hughes
J-E News Editor
Webster County is known for coal, and when we think of coal, we often think of the long coal trains that have passed through our communities for as far back as we can remember. But train and truck haulage aren’t the only ways coal is transported in our county. One Webster County mine ships it’s coal by water.
Steamport Dock, located in a picturesque area of the county, along the banks of the Green River between Onton and Sebree, loads coal barges for Sebree Mining, LLC (formerly Advent Mine). It’s not uncommon to see large numbers of deer and turkey in the woods around the dock or in the fields directly across the river.
In fact, just as we were about to leave the dock and head back to the mine, we spotted a deer making it’s way around the edge of the forest that runs right up to dock office.
Steamport has been in operation since 2003, when former mine owner Chester Thomas began shipping coal by river.
Boat pilot Johnnie Fulkerson and loadout operator Charles Hall have been with the dock since the day it opened. Before coming to Steamport, Fulkerson and Hall had worked together at Sebree Dock for close to 26 years. All in all the pair have worked together for nearly 37 years.
“It’s been real good working together all these years,” Hall said. He added that working with someone you could trust and anticipate made a lot of difference.
In the years since he started working on the Green River, Hall said that shipping has changed.
“It seems like barge traffic is actually a little slower than it used to be,” he said. “And barges are harder to get now. I don’t really know why.”
Through the years production has been up and down. At the dock’s peak, before Sebree’s Vision Mine closed in late 2007, the dock was running two shifts and put out as much as 14 barges, or 21,000 ton of coal, in a day.
After cutting back to only one shift and only one mine, production numbers dropped. But those numbers have been on a steady increase since Alliance Resources took over the operation in 2012.
October of 2013 was a record month for Steamport since it began operating only one shift. 151 barges were shipped out during the month, accounting for nearly 226,500 tons.
“We will ship about two million tons of coal this year,” said Paul Moore, Surface Manager at Onton #9 Mine. “We send a lot of coal to the Paradise power plant (in Muhlenberg County). We’re looking to ship 1.7 million ton to them next year.”
Alliance has made other improvements at Steamport as well, including adding an automated system to track tonnages and barge IDs, and increasing the rate at which the barges are loaded.
In 2008 Steamport was loading barges at about 950 tons per hour.
“Now we’re loading about 1350 to 1370 tons an hour,” said William “Goat” Taylor, who overseas the land side operations of the dock.
Some of the barges loaded at this little coal dock have been shipped as far as Tampa, Florida through the inland waterways along the Gulf Coast.
After being loaded, barges travel from Steamport up river to Paradise, or they make the nine hour journey downstream to the Ohio River. Unlike on larger water ways, where you will often see barges being moved in 8 or 16 barge tows, on the Green River they can only be moved four at a time.
Unlike Alliance’s Dotiki and Warrior Mines, Sebree does not have access to the railroad, making it’s river dock essential in the mine’s success.
But according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), shipping coal by barge rather than by rail could be a blessing. In a 2012 report, the EIA said that transportation costs made up about 11.4 percent of the total delivered cost of a barge shipment of coal. The cost of shipping by rail was about 38.6 percent of the total delivered cost.
From 2008 to 2010 the cost of shipping by river fell 3.6 percent, while rail cost went up 7.9 percent over the same period.
No comments:
Post a Comment