The Trump administration is taking another step toward reviving coal development on federal lands.
The Bureau of Land Management announced Friday it will hold a competitive coal lease sale Sept. 3 that would provide winning bidders with access to millions of tons of coal reserves at the Freedom mine in North Dakota.
The Coteau Properties, whose subsidiary North American Coal operates the mine, had applied to lease more than 1,000 acres containing roughly 18.3 million tons of recoverable federal coal.
BLM in April released a draft environmental assessment of that proposal that would allow the mine’s operator to expand its footprint by more than 640 acres to produce as much as 19 million tons of federal coal over the next five years, according to a formal notice of the lease sale that will be published in Monday’s Federal Register.
