Jan 05, 2008 - 04:01:24 CST
SOUTH HEART - Bob Kuylen, of South Heart, says the coal mine possibly coming to his land will be a stroke of good fortune for him and his brothers.They own much of the surface land where the newest mine in North Dakota in more than two decades would be located. They would be paid lease income so the coal could be mined out from under them.
On a warm sunny day in January, when he and his brother Pat Kuylen are loading out $10 spring wheat, it's hard to see the benefit of losing a place where the lush trees of South Heart Creek wind along a small valley on an otherwise treeless plain.
He said the mine would be something like striking oil - an unanticipated bonus of land ownership, one that makes up for years of getting hailed or droughted out.
Kuylen says his neighbors will have a different experience, trying to farm around a coal mine. They deserve time to ask questions and get answers before a coal mine interrupts the quilt pattern of farm life in the quiet countryside, he said.
"Some don't want to see it. and I don't blame them," he said.
The Stark County Planning and Zoning Board feels the same way.
Faced with a packed meeting room Thursday night in Dickinson, the board voted to table a zoning request from Great Northern Power Development to rezone 17 acres around the Kuylen farm for the coal mine.
Great Northern, a subsidiary that owns millions of railroad coal acres in North Dakota, wants to mine lignite and use it as feedstock for North Dakota's second synthetic fuels plant.
The coal mine and the plant would bring a couple of hundred permanent jobs and turn coal into a gas that would join the underground flow in a nearby Montana-Dakota Utilities gas pipeline.
Only last month, the company announced it had scrapped plans to build a coal-fired power plant in favor of making gas from coal, instead.
The process of making gas from coal allows the capture of carbon dioxide, and makes CO2 available for enhancing oil recovery, both environmental and economic wins in today's energy world.
One of Kuylen's country neighbors is Neil Tangen, who keeps 60-some horses on about 80 acres during the winter and then transfers them to a seasonal horse riding concession in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
Tangen is vice chairman of the Badlands Area Resource Council, a subsidiary of the Dakota Resource Council.
Tangen said getting the mine zoning tabled is a victory for his group and the 500 people who signed a petition asking the zoners to require an environmental impact statement before giving a zoning OK.
"If it's going to impact your life, you've got to get up and say something," Tangen said. "We set 'em (Great Northern) back for a couple of weeks, maybe longer."
Great Northern's landman Neal Messer said the zoning delay was not a setback, though in a perfect world the zoning hearing would have stuck to zoning, rather than turn into an environmental debate.
"They (zoning board) probably did what they needed to do," Messer said.
Zoning members Russ Hoff and George Nodland split their vote, but they both agree that giving South Heart folks and Great Northern more time to talk is a good outcome, either way.
They both support the project and think it represents a great opportunity for development for the region.
However, they could hear a lot of concern at the meeting on such things as roads and the effect of mining on underground water wells.
Hoff said, "The big issue was water."
Nodland said the timing was a little fast and that Great Northern should have had public meetings first.
Messer said those meetings are being scheduled now, starting with one in South Heart the week of Jan. 20, and then regularly afterward as long as people still seem interested in attending them.
Tangen said it's been Great Northern's practice to hold telephone-invite-only meetings. It's time for the public to get filled in, he said.
Nodland and Hoff said the zoning matter could be voted on as soon as early February.
Great Northern plans to file a mine permit application with the Public Service Commission later this month, and Messer said it will stick to that schedule.
The company hopes to start plant construction by 2010, though the mine would probably not be developed until 2011.
The coal mine is only one aspect of the project. Great Northern will have to clear a series of approvals before it constructs a plant that produces 90 million cubic feet daily of synthetic natural gas, roughly half the output of the Dakota Gasification Co. plant at Beulah.
Pat Kuylen said he feels like he has to consider the mine and the plant as progress.
"We need gas and electricity, and somebody has to sacrifice," he said. He said he can't quite imagine what a coal mine would look like out on the hills and fields where he's lived and farmed all his life; he knows only that it will mean a lot of adjustments for everyone.
Josh Wagner, the Kuylens' neighbor, pulled into the yard with a gleaming maroon-cab semi to help haul grain to the terminal at Gladstone.
The Wagners would live at the edge of the coal mine, not far from the Kuylens, and their lot would be more the downside, of mine traffic and noise, without the financial up.
Wagner has a live-and-let-live attitude. He says he's not opposed, but he does have environmental concerns, primarily because it's well known that coal mining does affect water quantity and quality.
"There's going to be good and there's going to be bad," Wagner said. "When it comes, we'll deal with what's there."
(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@;westriv.com.)
Victory!! wrote on Jan 5, 2008 12:35 PM:
I can read wrote on Jan 5, 2008 12:30 PM:
The people have spoken wrote on Jan 5, 2008 12:27 PM:
ck wrote on Jan 5, 2008 11:01 AM:
I want to move back to ND wrote on Jan 5, 2008 9:31 AM:
ex wrote on Jan 5, 2008 8:28 AM:
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