According to local radio newswire WWVA, the operation encompasses about 10,000 acres at a site near Clarksburg and will contain about $US7 billion in mineable coal. Officials for Rosebud are currently working on the permit application, which should be completed by the US summer season.

When the mine commences production, an estimated 80 mining jobs could be created, the news service learned at a recent public hearing on the project.

Last month, Rosebud confirmed it had furloughed more than 25% of its total workforce at several of its Pennsylvania operations. The lay-offs of 225 from the company’s staff of 800 are temporary, it added, with everyone hopefully being called back in May.

“The steel industry has been running at about 50 per cent capacity,” Rosebud president and founder Cliff Forrest told Pennsylvania newspaper the Indiana Gazette, pointing out that many steelmakers were not taking their contracted coal supplies from producers.

While Forrest opted to keep his Indiana County operations running, cuts were seen among all levels of workers at Rosebud’s complexes in Armstrong, Cambria, Clearfield, Elk and Somerset counties. It is the company’s first slowdown-related furlough since the early 1990s, he told the paper.

Forrest established Rosebud Mining in 1979, and began extracting coal from its first deep mine shortly after acquiring the Queenstown coal cleaning facility in 1982.

Rosebud now operates 14 underground mines in Pennsylvania and Ohio from the Upper Freeport, Lower Freeport, Upper Kittanning, Middle Kittanning and Lower Kittanning seams.