Every day 11,000 tons of mine refuse is moved into the Seward Power Plant.  The plant uses a portion of their 100 workers to do this, but they are just some of the folks who benefit from the plant.

“It would also include potentially hundreds of other contract truckers, operators at the mine sites, you also have a lot of parts and services that we purchase,” Robindale Energy CFO Jud Kroh explains.

“To see the work and to talk to the workers, understand that this industry employs 1,200 people directly and 4,000 people indirectly.  That’s 5,200 family sustaining jobs,” Representative Keith Rothfus adds.

Representative Rothfus toured the facility Friday and called it a good economic and environmental example.  The facility uses waste coal, which helps to clean up our streams and rivers.

“This plant and the other plants in the area, they’re the only cost effective ways to remediate these waste coal piles, which have been left by bankrupt steel companies or bankrupt coal companies,” Kroh says.

Representative Rothfus adds his SENSE Act was recently passed in the House of Representatives.  According to Congressman Rothfus, this movement will allow what they call the cleanest coal plant in the country, as well as other power plants like it to continue to operate, “To have those jobs threatened by a one-size fits all regulation by the EPA is just not acceptable.  Again, that one-size fits all approach from the EPA will actually stop the environmental progress we’ve had with cleaning up rivers, streams, and the countryside.”

Officials are looking to pass this legislation in the Senate in order to keep these energy jobs in our region.