Alliance Coal and supporters on Tuesday afternoon celebrated the grand opening of the Henderson County Mine, which company officials said will pay miners upwards of $100,000 per year.
“We’re going to be here for decades,” said Joe Craft, the president and CEO of parent company Alliance Resource Partners L.P., based in Tulsa, Okla.
The operation will be manned by the end of 2025 by about 300 people, and eventually by more than 400, including about 260 new miners and 140 from the sister River View Mine in Union County, according to Zach Brown, the new general manager for both operations.
The Henderson County miners will earn an average of $34.65 per hour plus benefits that will include 100% health insurance with no premiums or deductibles, Brown said.
“You can graduate high school and come here and earn $100,000” a year working 50-hour weeks, he said.
From wages to taxes to local purchases, the operation will have “a $300 million per year economic impact,” Missy Vanderpool, executive director of Henderson Economic Development, said.
CEO Craft and other coal evangelists said the pending start of production reflects a change in U.S. energy policy under the Trump administration to encourage the use of coal in generating electricity, not only for everyday use but for power-intensive cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence processing centers.
The ceremony took place in a 30,000-square-foot metal building atop a rise surrounded by corn fields overlooking Sulphur Springs Road, off Kentucky 145 about 3½ miles south of Corydon.
The building will serve as the main office, warehouse and bathhouse for the Henderson County Mine. It’s so new that many offices still smell of lumber, and few have chairs yet.
Behind it, a combination air- and man-shaft has been dug and an elevator constructed to transport miners down 347 feet to the No. 9 coal seam, while providing them a steady supply of fresh air. The company two years ago said it would invest $35 million in the operation.
The Henderson County Mine (known inside the company as the Corydon portal) is an extension of Alliance’s mammoth River View Mine. Alliance has tunneled some 25,000 feet easterly from River View through the No. 11 coal seam, which lies above portions of the permanently closed No. 9 seam previously mined by the former Peabody Coal Co. Camp Complex in Union County.
GM Brown said in about a month, the underground passageway will extend down to the unmined No. 9 seam in Henderson County.
That will allow the Corydon portal to begin operations. Six “super units,” each with two continuous mining machines that use spinning drums to claw tons of bituminous coal each minute from the 66-inch-thick seam, sending coal back to underground conveyors that will transport it to the former Highland Coal complex in eastern Union County.
From there, coal will be transported by above-ground conveyors to the Alliance coal-washing plant beside the Ohio River at Uniontown, where it will be loaded onto barges for transport to customers. Brown said the Henderson County Mine will produce six million clean tons of coal per year.
“We’ve been planning this for some time,” Craft said. “LG&E (Louisville Gas & Electric) incentivized us with words and future contracts” to develop the Corydon portal.
“LG&E was convinced that they wanted to run their (coal-fired power plants) through 2040,” he said. “With that encouragement, we laid out this development. We thought the right thing to do was, have two portals” — the original River View portal near Waverly and the new Corydon portal — “to expand capacity.”
“At times we questioned whether that was the right decision, until the election” in 2024 that returned Donald Trump to the White House, said Craft, who declared that the U.S. is in “an arms race with China” to develop data centers and that “the national security is imperative.”
With Trump in office, he said, “The demand for our product is real. Keeping coal (power) plants is real.”
“We’re confident and sure (that developing the Corydon portal) was the right decision,” Craft said.
“We’ve been working on this project for several years now,” Vanderpool said. “It’s been a very fun several years.”
Along the way, she said, Alliance agreed to relinquish coal reserves appraised at $8 million beneath where Pratt Paper built its half-billion-dollar complex in Henderson to ensure that the coal will never be mined, eliminating concerns of future ground subsidence.
Henderson County Judge-Executive Brad Schneider said the county provided $1 million in incentives to Alliance and is upgrading Sulphur Springs Road, widening and adding layers of asphalt to the narrow country road and adding shoulders. He said Alliance will bring “good jobs and prosperity to our community.”
“What a proud day this is for Henderson County and the Commonwealth of Kentucky,” said state Rep. J.T. Payne, R-Henderson.
State Sen. Robby Mills (R-Henderson) assailed “radical environmentalists (like former Democratic presidents) Obama, Clinton and Biden” who he said relied on “flawed and radical climate ideology” to steer the country away from burning coal to generate electricity.
State Rep. Jim Gooch (R-Providence), chair of the House Energy Committee, hailed “something we haven’t done in a long time … dedicating the opening of a new coal mine.” He said coal is needed not just for the U.S., but for billions of people overseas who are unserved or under-served by electricity.
Alliance Resource Partners L.P. is a coal, oil and gas producer that reported total revenue of $2.4 billion in 2024 and net income of $360.9 million. It says it is the second largest coal producer in the eastern United States.
