Company bids less than a penny per ton in biggest US coal sale in over a decade

A Navajo tribe-owned company bid $186,000 to lease 167 million tons of coal on federal lands in southeastern Montana on Monday in the biggest U.S. coal sale in more than a decade. Two NTEC representatives attended the sale at the Bureau of Land Management local office in Billings, Montana. At the last successful government lease sale in the region, a subsidiary of Peabody Energy paid $793 million, or $1.10 per ton, for 721 million tons of coal in Wyoming.