Coal’s revival is creating divisions in Canada’s energy heartland

At the top of Grassy Mountain, some 6,700 feet above sea level, seams of coal are baked into the mountainside, visible through mining in this stretch of the Rocky Mountains in southwestern Alberta from the early to mid-1900s. This and other former mines dot the picturesque mountain towns on the eastern side of the continental divide, the industry having moved out of the region decades ago after plummeting prices and demand made mining here unprofitable.

But Grassy still has more coal to give — much more. It’s now the centre of a yearslong battle pitting nearby towns’ economic interests against environmental worries from downstream communities and ranchers. And this time, it’s being driven not by demand to heat homes in Canada, but to feed steelmakers in China, Japan, South Korea, India and other Asian countries.

Nearly 60 years after this site closed, locals are once again pinning their hopes for an economic revival on this windswept mountainside. Northback Holdings Corp., a division of Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting PTY., is working to reopen the former mine.

This is Hancock’s second attempt after an earlier application was rejected by a joint federal and provincial review panel in 2021 over concerns about the impact on the nearby water ecosystem. Northback chief executive Brad Johnston believes the company can address the deficiencies in its first application and go further in restoring the mountain, including much of the unreclaimed former mine site.

Hancock has spent more than a decade and over $150 million on a project that faces stiff opposition and is still at least four years from opening. It’s promising to scale back its original plans by around 40 per cent to produce 2.5 million metric tons a year instead of four million, boost reclamation efforts during the course of mining, build a water treatment plant and stick around for years after production ceases.

The company is persistent because its forecasts show an undersupply in the global market within the next decade and pricing levels far beyond what it costs to extract the coal.

The proposal and others like it have struck a nerve in Alberta, a region traditionally friendly toward resource development, both in terms of public support and government policy. Country music star Corb Lund led a petition campaign this year to stop coal mining in the eastern slopes of the Rockies, attempting to force a provincial vote on the issue this month, unsuccessfully. A recent survey found a majority of the public would have supported his position in a referendum.

The fight over the project also reveals a little-known fact about Canadian coal. Within the country, it has been on a long decline, as governments moved to reduce coal used for power production. But at the country’s western ports, coal is still king of commodity volumes. About 39.9 million metric tons were exported from Vancouver last year, compared to 30 million tons of petroleum products.

While the province of British Columbia now accounts for the majority of coal production, Alberta has seen a number of proposals in recent years and the province recently approved an expansion of the Vista Coal Mine in Hinton, near Jasper National Park, that will make it the largest thermal coal mine in North America.

About 70 per cent of the world’s steel supply depends on metallurgical coal and Canada is the fifth-largest global supplier, accounting for roughly $9 billion in exports.

Northback isn’t the only such new proposal in the Rockies. Northwest of Calgary, Valory Resources Inc. is pitching Blackstone, an underground metallurgical mine in Clearwater County, and another one called Mine 14 near the town of Grande Cache.

In BC, Conuma Resources Ltd. reopened a mine near Tumbler Ridge in 2024 and a sister project was included in the province’s recent deal book marketed to global investors. Glencore PLC is also seeking to expand its Fording River site to maintain the mine’s 10 million metric tons of annual production.

Johnston, who took over as Northback’s chief executive in July, says any coal mined at Grassy Mountain will all be for export off the west coast of Canada, largely out of the ports of Vancouver and Prince Rupert. The company’s projections, he says, show it can be profitable over the course of its projected 25-year lifespan due to strong Asian demand for steel-making coal, listing Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia and India as possible customers.

The type of coal here is also high-quality enough for European steel producers. “The world wants this coal, it needs it,” he says.

The proposal would be a major employer for the five historic mining communities near Grassy Mountain. He cites the roughly 400 full-time jobs needed to operate it and the $2.2 billion in government revenue the mine will generate over its lifetime, according to a report prepared for the company by EY.

The company has already been sponsoring local organizations and has hired locals for its preparatory work, including a First Nations security contractor. Johnston says he is aiming to file another application in the coming months, with a potential target of opening in late 2030 if it receives regulatory approval.

He acknowledges the company’s first application did not sufficiently deal with concerns over its environmental impact. A joint federal-provincial review panel found the project was “not in the public interest” and would harm the nearby population of westslope cutthroat trout. He believes their new proposal is improved enough to meet regulatory hurdles, but knows there’s widespread opposition to coal.

“There are some people that are opposed to what we do, no matter how well we do it, or whatever systems of controls we propose to put into place,” he says. The company is always willing to answer questions about environmental management, he says, and local support “doesn’t come unconditionally, and their expectation is that we’re going to provide jobs and economic benefit, but we’re going to do so in an environmentally responsible way.

There’s been more public backing in Canada for energy projects since United States President Donald Trump’s administration began pressuring the country on trade, says Heather Exner-Pirot, director of energy, natural resources and environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. That attention has largely been around oil and gas, and hasn’t necessarily translated to coal.

“I think most people, even in Canada, don’t appreciate that metallurgical coal is our biggest export by volume out of the Port of Vancouver and the Port of Prince Rupert, and that by revenue, after gold, it’s usually our top-producing mineral product,” she says.

She points out the towns closest to the proposed mine are largely in favour and people further away are opposed. In Crowsnest Pass, the municipality nearest Grassy Mountain, more than 70 per cent voted to support the mine in a 2024 plebiscite. But municipal councils downstream, including in Lethbridge, Alberta’s fourth-largest city, have been staunchly opposed.

While prime minister Mark Carney’s federal government has been encouraging “nation building” projects to spur economic activity and build stronger interprovincial connections, the coal in western Canada won’t be going to the steel factories of southern Ontario and Quebec. The cost to ship by rail across the country makes it too expensive for the steel factories to use.

Instead, demand is driven by Asian countries and interest in Canada as a conscientious steward in producing coal. “If you are a Japan or a Korea, you may be willing actually to pay a premium for that better environmentally and socially responsible product,” Exner-Pirot says.

Steel is “ubiquitous” in products ranging from batteries to large-scale energy infrastructure, said Ian Lange, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines. Demand for steel and therefore metallurgical coal can be a proxy for economic activity around the world. Alberta is one of the most attractive places for natural resource extraction given its friendly regulatory environment and ease of getting to Pacific ports, he says, and miners have been making greater efforts to ensure environmental protection.

But he says “it’s really hard to say with certainty that this won’t be a problem 30, 40 years down the line.”

The environmental pushback to increased mining in the Rockies can point to substantial levies against operators in recent years. Coal mines in BC faced $60 million in federal fines in 2021 for water contamination breaches, and another $16 million in fines from the province in 2023. And as recently as this past July, Glencore-owned Elk Valley Operations Ltd. was fined an additional $269,000  as part of a larger $3.6 million ruling over delaying construction of water treatment facilities and 171 water quality breaches related to selenium.

Concerns over water quality extend south of the border. A 2024 study from the U.S. Geological Survey found evidence of selenium pollution as far as 350 miles away from Elk Valley’s mine along the Columbia River and contamination in other cross-border waterways.

Lund is a fourth-generation Albertan, his family settling in the early 1900s on ranch land they still own near the Montana border. He spearheaded a petition to have a referendum on banning some new coal mining that garnered more than 170,000 signatures earlier this year, though the question did not get put on the ballot for voting day on Oct. 19.

He says he was drawn into the issue after rancher friends of his worried about the potential impacts on downstream water from selenium and other contamination. The amount of water used and the air quality are other concerns.

“As far as I can tell, it’s a bad deal and it’s going to ruin our water and our ranch land, and there’s nothing in it for Albertans,” he said. “And I think it’s a foreign billionaire coming here to take our coal and make all the money and leave us with the mess.”

His family’s land isn’t threatened by the mine reopening, but his residence in Lethbridge is served by the watershed from around Grassy Mountain. He says he’s seen the issue resonate across political lines in the largely conservative, pro-resource development province. Many Albertans view the Rocky Mountains as “the soul of the province, and that includes a good chunk of the conservative base who are hunters and fishermen and ranchers and irrigating farmers,” Lund says. “So it’s not just a left-right issue. It’s very close to a lot of people’s hearts here.”

He’s “been in this fight for almost seven years now, and we’ve outlasted two premiers” as well as “multiple CEOs from the coal companies” and they will do everything they can to stop new mining in the nearby Rockies.

Lucas Michalsky, a cattle rancher about 20 minutes east of Grassy Mountain, has a different take on the mine’s impact. “We are the forgotten corner of Alberta,” says Michalsky, whose family worked in nearby coal mines after moving from Poland in the early 1900s.

The Grassy Mountain proposal has already brought more hope to local residents about the prospect of higher-quality jobs. “Northback has put in tens of millions of dollars,” into the area, he says. “All the people that are against coal haven’t put a dime into our community.”

Some local residents work in Glencore’s coal mines across the B.C. border, or see their children move to work in northern Alberta’s oil sands. The draw for Michalsky is seeing his kids close to home where they might “have a job as a millwright or a welder or an electrician at Northback, and come home every night so they can run cattle.”

He believes the environmental impact is overstated by opponents, who are largely not from the immediate towns that will benefit from the mine. “This is a blue-collar community. It always has been. And we’ve lost our logging. We’ve lost our oil and gas. Mining is the only thing we have left, because we never really had much of the first two.”

—With assistance from Mario Baker Ramirez.