Pittsburgh company Beard Technologies, a subsidiary of the Beard Company of Oklahoma City, signed an agreement with Pinnacle Mining Company to build and operate the coal-recovery plant. Beard Technologies is located at the University of Pittsburgh Advanced Research Center, and has invested US$7 million of private funds in the pond recovery project.

The recovery facility will be located at Pinnacle's Smith Branch Coal Refuse Disposal Facility near Pineville, West Virginia and will process raw slurry to recovery 240,000 to 320,000 tons of clean coal per year.

Under the agreement, Beard Technologies will take 240,000 tons of the coal each year for a processing fee and have the right of first refusal to buy some or all of any remaining coal. The six-year agreement can be renewed for another four years.

The technology was developed at Virginia Tech which developed the Microcel technology in use worldwide to separate coal and other minerals from impurities.

The novel flotation process, known as microbubble flotation, was developed about ten years ago from a series of research projects funded by U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

Recently, the focus has turned to solving the fine coal dewatering problem. The group developed chemical additives to facilitate vacuum filtration, licensed to Ondeo Nalco, a large chemical company in Illinois.

Following successful trials of the dewatering technology on fine coal re-mined from West Virginia Beard Technologies decided to build a plant to recover the coal from the impoundment.

Fine coal containing large amounts of impurities will be pumped from the pond to a newly constructed plant on the site, where the advanced separation technologies will be used to produce clean coal containing low moisture.

“This will be a good example of turning a liability to ‘gold’ using an advanced separation technology developed through a successful federally funded research program,” congressman Rick Boucher said at a Virginia Tech press conference in October.

There are reportedly 713 fine coal ponds and impoundments in the US, mostly in the Appalachian coalfields. An estimated two billion tons of coal are contained in these ponds.