NEW YORK — Peabody Energy Corp., the largest U.S. coal producer by sales, said Monday that rail congestion is stopping it from delivering as much as it wants to from mines in the west of the country.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Greg Boyce said demand for power-station coal from the Powder River Basin mining region is rising faster than railroads can increase capacity.
“We would have liked to see more improvement than we’ve seen now,” Boyce said Monday on the St. Louis-based company’s third-quarter earnings call.
The bottlenecks are limiting Peabody’s ability to capitalize on higher demand at U.S. power utilities, which used more coal and less natural gas in September and whose inventories are the lowest since 2005. The Powder River Basin, in northern Wyoming and southern Montana, is home to the thickest and cheapest-to-mine seams of coal in the United States.
Peabody has three sites there that produced a combined 134 million tons of low-sulfur coal in 2013. Bloomberg News
