MSHA silica rule delay poised to linger long past rescheduled compliance date

After more than 18,000 days since the federal institute responsible for recommendations preventing work-related illness called for it.

After generations of miner advocates demanded it.

Now Aug. 18 figures to be just another day.

In April 2024, the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration issued a landmark rule to protect mine workers from toxic silica dust. The rule cut in half the federally allowed limit of exposure to respirable crystalline silica driving a sharp rise in black lung disease among increasingly younger miners. The new rule came 50 years after the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the federal agency that makes recommendations to guard against work-related illnesses, recommended the new exposure limit.

The rule set a compliance date of April 14, 2025, for coal mine operators, giving them a year to prepare for its implementation.

But on April 8, six days before the rule was to kick in for coal mine operators, MSHA announced what it called a temporary enforcement pause of the rule until Aug. 18. The agency cited sweeping Trump administration staff cuts within NIOSH, saying they could impact supply of certified respirators and personal dust monitors.

“Given the unforeseen NIOSH restructuring, and other technical reasons, MSHA offers this four-month temporary pause to provide time for operators to secure necessary equipment and otherwise come into compliance,� MSHA said in its April 8 notice to stakeholders.

But that four-month pause is poised to last longer due to an MSHA-supported federal court pause of the rule also dating back to April in a case that industry groups filed to challenge the rule, arguing it was too far-reaching.

Attorneys for MSHA and the industry groups reported in a Monday court filing they are still discussing a potential settlement. They asked the court to keep the case on hold for another two months. The court previously granted the parties a two-month extension to accommodate settlement talks.

That court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, ordered a temporary emergency pause of the rule in an April 4 order.

Later that month, MSHA put up a fight against unions and medical professionals looking to reenact the silica rule — a shift from its alignment with those groups under the Biden administration. The agency submitted federal court filings opposing efforts by the United Mine Workers of America, United Steelworkers and American Thoracic Society to intervene in the case.

The unions and, separately, the ATS, an organization of physicians, scientists, researchers and respiratory therapists whose goal is to prevent, treat and cure respiratory diseases, filed motions to intervene. The parties cited uncertainty over the rule’s future, questioning whether the agency still supports it.

MSHA, an agency within the Department of Labor, said the concerns cited by the ATS and unions weren’t evidence-based, ignoring that the agency hadn’t changed its legal position on the rule’s validity or indicated it would no longer defend the rule.

A Department of Labor spokesperson on Wednesday said MSHA couldn’t comment on issues related to silica exposure due to legal action regarding the silica rule.

“We take very seriously our obligation to protect the health and safety of miners, ensuring that each miner can contribute to their families and communities,� the spokesperson said in an email.

But with the rule stuck in industry-initiated limbo, National Black Lung Association president Gary Hairston expects miners to keep suffering as they breathe in more toxic silica without the protection the feds pledged 16 months ago.

Mine workers and researchers have attributed central Appalachia’s sharp increase in black lung incidence among increasingly younger miners cutting into more surrounding rock as coal seams thin, yielding greater exposure to silica dust.

“All that rock that they’re cutting into now, it’s going to affect these young men,� Hairston, who quit mining coal in 2002 at 48 after his black lung diagnosis, said in a phone interview Wednesday.

“Every day that MSHA is not enforcing the silica rule is a day that miners are being exposed unnecessarily to deadly dust,� said Quenton King, government affairs specialist at Appalachian Voices, an environmental and miner advocacy group.

UMWA head: 'Enforce the rule'

The UMWA on Wednesday posted a video to social media in which UMWA International President Cecil Roberts urged that the silica rule be allowed to take effect.

“We’ve buried too many brothers and sisters already,� Roberts says in the video. “Silica dust is killing our miners. MSHA knows it. The science proves it. Enforce the rule.�

NIOSH researchers found in a 2018-published study of lung exams collected from 1970 to 2017 that 20.6% of miners with careers of 25 years or more in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia had black lung — a pronounced increase following a national low point in the late 1990s.

Black lung clinic data the Gazette-Mail first reported in 2023 showed central Appalachia’s share of miners with large opacities on chest X-rays dwarfed the number of miners with the same result outside the region, defined as West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia.

The data spanning July 2019 through June 2023 show 83.4% of miners with large opacities on chest X-rays seen at federally supported black lung clinics were in those three states, with West Virginia having a persistently high concentration of such miners.

Just 44.7% of coal miners nationwide were employed in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia on average in 2021, underscoring the outsized incidence of severe lung disease in the region, per federal Energy Information Administration data.

West Virginia black lung clinics operating with the support of the state’s then-Department of Health and Human Resources, a federal grantee, accounted for 35.2% of all miners with large opacities on chest X-rays seen at federally supported black lung clinics since 2021, per the data reported by the Gazette-Mail in 2023.

“This is clear evidence that coal miners are still being overexposed and most likely are being exposed to excessive amounts of silica,� Dr. Leonard Go, an occupational pulmonologist and assistant director of the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health-based Mining Education and Research Center, said of the data in a 2023 phone interview.

The rule reduces the permissible exposure limit for silica dust to 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air and creates an action level of 25 micrograms for a full-shift exposure.

When miner exposures are at or above the action level but at or below the permissible exposure limit, the final rule requires mine operators to perform periodic sampling until miner exposures are below the action level.

The new MSHA standard:

• Mandates that mine operators use engineering controls to prevent miner overexposure to silica dust and use dust samplings and environmental evaluations to monitor exposures
• Forces metal and nonmetal mine operators to set up medical surveillance programs to provide periodic health examinations at no cost to miners
• Requires miners’ exposures to silica to be monitored through recent sampling and qualitative evaluations, removing an option of using industry-wide objective data or historical sample data included in the rule as initially proposed

MSHA projected last year that the rule would result in 1,067 avoided deaths and 3,746 avoided cases of silica-related illnesses.

Revenue, production far exceed expected compliance costs 

In an April 2 court filing by industry groups led by the National Stone, Sand and Gravel Association, an executive at one of the nation’s most prominent coal companies with subsidiaries near Davis and Wheeling listed what he indicated were high costs of abiding by the rule.

Kenneth Murray, vice president of operations at Alliance Coal LLC, said his company and its subsidiaries estimated costs of roughly $2.3 million of past and ongoing investments for compliance preparation at company subsidiaries by the rule’s then-April 14 effective date.

Murray reported one-time expenses of $5 million each at three longwall operations, including Mettiki Coal near Davis and Tunnel Ridge LLC near Wheeling, comprising a $15 million investment. Murray also asserted it would cost $1.9 million annually to support compliance efforts.

Murray’s report projected first-year expenses to comply would exceed $19 million for Alliance Coal.

Tulsa, Oklahoma-based parent company Alliance Resource Partners L.P.’s total revenue for 2024 was $4.89 billion, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. That means the first-year silica rule compliance costs projected by Alliance Coal — Alliance Resource Partners’ mining operations holding company — would comprise just 0.39% of its parent company’s 2024 revenue.

Alliance Resource Partners reported $45 million in holdings of bitcoin, a cryptocurrency. That is more than double Alliance Coal’s first-year compliance costs alone.

Alliance Resource Partners sold 33.3 million tons of coal in 2024, meaning its rule compliance costs would amount to $0.57 per ton sold.

American Consolidated Natural Resources, which has subsidiaries that operate West Virginia coal mines, would have considerably lower rule compliance costs, company corporate safety director Edwin “Pat� Brady indicated in the industry groups’ April 2 court filing.

ACNR needed to invest roughly $517,000 in March and April 2025 to prepare to comply with the rule, according to Brady. ACNR also needed to spend approximately $982,000 for the rest of 2025 for compliance, subject to other unknown costs, Brady reported. The company needed to invest roughly $1.5 million annually going forward to comply with air sampling provisions in the rule, per the filing.

St. Clairsville, Ohio-based ACNR has reported producing around 30 million tons of coal per year, meaning first-year compliance expenses quantified by Brady would cost $0.10 per ton of coal produced.

The average annual sale of bituminous coal, which ACNR subsidiary operations have produced, was $97.96 per short ton in 2022, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

ACNR formed from a 2020 Murray Energy Holdings Co. bankruptcy plan per the direction of Murray loan lenders.

“[I]t's no surprise that the mining industry would rather defend their profit margins than do the right thing and keep miners safe from the disease,� King said.

'Real protection' urged

The delay in silica rule implementation comes amid the Trump administration accelerating a long-term decline in MSHA staff. Carey Clarkson, national vice president with the National Council of Field Labor Locals union that represents MSHA employees, told the Gazette-Mail in April a President Donald Trump-ordered hiring freeze cut off the hiring process for 90 people who had been offered MSHA positions.

Roughly 120 more employees were lost after they took a voluntary resignation offer as the Trump administration looks to dramatically downsize the federal workforce.

Hairston, a Beckley resident, reported that MSHA “hasn’t said too much� about the status of the silica rule.

“We’ve been trying to find out what’s going on,� Hairston said.

“If MSHA isn't planning on enforcing the rule [Monday], it's irresponsible to not inform miners and the advocates who have fought tirelessly for a silica rule for a decade,� King said.

UMWA spokesperson Erin Bates urged MSHA and the Trump administration to “acknowledge the critical importance of this issue and move forward with immediate enforcement� so that miners get “more than just treatment.�

“[T]hey deserve real protection,� Bates said.