U.S. Coal Industry Redux 2015: It's Not Getting Any Easier for Alpha, Arch, Cloud Peak, or Peabody

U.S. Coal Industry Redux 2015: It’s Not Getting Any Easier for Alpha, Arch, Cloud Peak, or Peabody by Tom Sanzillo, IEEFA.org

Nothing whatsoever has changed in the troubling tea leaves for the U.S. coal industry lately, and our forecast into 2016 remains gloomy and getting gloomier.

Here are the broad strokes for each of the four largest producers, ranked by size:

Peabody Energy’s numbers for 2014 show that the U.S. coal industry has decoupled from the broader, gradually recovering economy and that the company’s spiral has deepened. Company executives themselves forecast no recovery on the horizon, seeing further losses this year.

Peabody epitomizes the industry’s fundamental structural...