Coal has had a series of regulatory wins under the Trump administration, but it has struggled to regain market share.
Frontieras North America believes it has a way to change that.
The company has just signed a memorandum of understanding with Western Fuels-Wyoming Inc. to explore building a coal-to-products processing plant at the Dry Fork Mine north of Gillette, Frontieras Chief Commercial Officer Andrea Moran told Cowboy State Daily.
If built, the facility will unlock what Moran calls coal’s “intrinsic value,” creating four product streams from roughly 2.7 million tons of Powder River Basin coal annually.
“We don’t combust (coal),” she said. “We don’t burn it. But we unlock what’s inside it.”
That includes commercial liquids such as naphtha, kerosene and low-sulfur diesel, according to the company’s website, as well as useful gases such as hydrogen and methane, and chemicals ranging from fertilizer to sulfuric acid.
Even the leftover coal is a product, Moran added.
“We call it FasCarbon,” she said. “It’s coke. It is de-volatized, de-moisturized, and de-sulfurized. It burns as clean as natural gas.”
The process Frontieras uses is not gasification, Moran added. It’s something new.
“We fractionate coal basically identically to how crude is fractionated,” she said. “So it’s not gasification, it’s a novel process. And we have nine patents on five continents.”
New Fractionation Process
The new technology Frontieras is about to deploy globally was developed roughly 10 years ago by co-founder and CEO Matthew McKean and Executive Vice President and CTO Joe Weatherspoon, according to materials at the company’s website.
Large demonstration projects have already proven the new process and the company is ready to build commercial-scale plants.
The first is landing in West Virginia, and is underway.
Gillette is in line to become the second plant. If studies pan out, it would co-locate with Western Fuels-Wyoming, a power cooperative with its own mining operation since 1990.
“With Wyoming being the nation’s No. 1 coal state, it’s a natural place to prove coal can be commercialized, and not just mined,” Western Fuels-Wyoming General Manager Chris Fare told Cowboy State Daily. “We think it points to a real, lasting future for Wyoming coal.”
Gillette Had Unique Advantages
Western Fuels had a big advantage over other sites, Moran said.
“A lot of the infrastructure is already there,” she said. “There’s conveyors, there’s electricity lines. What we’re building in West Virginia is a greenfield site, and what we would be doing with Dry Fork and Western Fuels would be considered more of a brownfield site.”
The area also already has a training pipeline in place, according to Energy Capital Economic Development CEO Rusty Bell.
“We already train all the MSHA miners,” he said. “New miner training happens at Gillette Community College. So this fits nicely into what we already do.”
Frontieras might specialty-training programs, Bell acknowledged
“We can work with them on that to make sure we have the technicians that they need,” he said. “There’s also always industrial electrical and diesel mechanics and machining that those kinds of things always need, and we do train for those as well.”
Moran said advantaged sites like the one in Gillette are exactly what the company is looking for as it pushes forward with what Moran described as a $10 billion pipeline of similarly sized refineries to create multiple product streams from coal.
“For our first facility in West Virginia, most of that will go into the Asian steel market,” she said. “But we foresee as we move out West, using PRB, we’ll get four products, and one of them would be a coke product that would probably be railed out from the Dry Fork Mine into coal-fired utilities as a fuel switch.”
The other three products would be low-sulfur diesel, naphtha and a kerosene line that can produce jet fuel.
Struggles To Win Market Share
This proposed new use for coal comes as domestic producers have struggled to regain market share, even as industry advocates point to recent Trump administration actions they say have improved coal’s outlook.
“We’re about half of what we produced at peak, 250 million tons, roughly this year, compared to 450 in years past, like in 2008, 2009,” American Coal Council CEO Emily Arthun told Cowboy State Daily. “But worldwide, coal is actually growing rapidly. Which is why a West Coast port is so important for the United States. Asian countries desperately want and need our coal.”
Arthun is looking for market demand to start turning around, thanks to all the regulatory wins.
“There’s been numerous coal days at the White House where they’ve rolled things out that are absolutely helping the coal industry right now,” she said. “We’re seeing grants given to the West Coast port in Oakland, which certainly does help the Wyoming and Utah coal industry. When Oakland is open, that’s an export opportunity for coal out of the West Coast that we desperately need.”
The Port of Oakland’s Turning Basins Widening Project, which will make it possible to serve larger ships, is supported to begin by 2028. The project will add 334 feet to the width of the inner harbor, relocating dredged soil to the Montezuma Wetlands, retiring 200 acres of habitat.
Grants have also been given to utilities, Arthun added, which hasn’t happened since 2013, and the moratorium on leasing coal has also been lifted.
“You’re seeing retirements of coal plants delayed, especially when you’re looking at data center use and how much energy they need,” Arthun added. “The country is becoming more aware of where their energy is coming from.”
Coal Is More Than Energy
A brand-new process for unlocking coal’s value adds even more potential to the brighter future Arthun is hoping for.
“To be able to have this innovative company come in and see the value in coal and see the resources it can provide with this new technology,” she said. “This new way of processing coal is just absolutely incredible at a time when coal really needs individuals who see its value.”
Coal doesn’t just provide energy, Wyoming Mining Association Executive Director Travis Deti told Cowboy State Daily. It has other industrial uses ranging from concrete to everyday electronics.
“I think it’s really exciting to see these companies coming in and taking a hard look at it and saying, ‘Yes, we can. We can do coal to products. We can do coal to diesel.”
It’s also a chance to stop exporting commodities to other states to make products there. Keeping the products in state captures more of the economic potential of a commodity.
It boosts the state’s bottom line and creates more jobs, too.
“We have all the resources in the ground that the country and the world would want,” he said. “But we have to have a place to send them, whether it’s our coal industry for power production or some of the other value-added project, like uranium for nuclear fuel for power plants.”
Feasibility To Start Next Year
Right now, things are at the memorandum stage, which means feasibility studies must be done first. These will help prove the economic viability of a plant in Wyoming.
But, if all goes well with that, Moran said the company envisions a similarly sized plant to West Virginia's.
That plant there is designed to process 7,500 tons of coal per day, or roughly 2.7 million tons annually. Wyoming’s plant would employ around 200, Moran said.
The exact timeline of construction will depend on what’s learned in the feasibility studies, as well as continued negotiations between Frontieras and its partner, Western Fuels. rMoran said the company will likely start its feedstock studies in the first quarter of next year.
Meanwhile, some of the long-term, off-take contracts that will support these plants are already in place. Others are being negotiated.
“I can’t disclose who at this point in time, but all of our products are 100% exclusively bought under long-term off take contracts,” Moran added. “There’s a major off-taker we’ve been in negotiations with, and then we have quite a few other ones, large off-takers. I mean, we’re talking with other energy, oil-producing off takers or companies that would take our fuels and all of our products.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
