At least for the short term.

These are good economic times in Carbon and Emery counties, the heart of Utah's coal country.

"For the first time in recent memory, there are Help Wanted signs in the coal industry and other businesses in our area," said Delynn Fielding, Carbon County's economic development director.

Added Emery County counterpart Mike McCandless: "We've gone from unemployment in 2001 of 14 percent to around just under 4 percent. Basically, in a rural area, 4 percent is full employment."

Comparatively high prices for oil and natural gas have made coal more attractive than ever to power plants supplying the country's unquenchable thirst for electricity. As the price of coal rises and technology steadily improves, coal reserves that previously were considered out of reach have become attainable.

And that's good news for Utah. A century of mining has gobbled up the easy-to-get coal. Companies now are going after reserves that even one generation ago seemed impossibly expensive or physically impossible to mine.

Although they are succeeding, unbounded optimism about the industry's future is tempered by the knowledge that Utah has a finite quantity of coal - especially with the estimated 9.1 billion tons of coal in the Kaiparowits Plateau off limits because it is within the Escalante-Grand Staircase National Monument.

"In 50 years, there probably won't be much coal left" in Utah's two main coal fields, the Book Cliffs or Wasatch Plateau, acknowledged Utah Geological Survey geologist Michael Vanden Berg. He is the author of the state's latest annual report on coal production and distribution.

"The good stuff is gone. Mining companies are going after scraps now. But there are quite a few tons of scrap left, so the short-term future is bright."

His report for 2005 noted that Utah's 12 active mines produced 24.6 million tons of coal in 2005, a 12.6 percent increase over 2004's 10-year low of 21.8 million tons. Vanden Berg is projecting 26.7 million tons will be mined this year and that production next year will reach 29.3 million tons, surpassing the record of 27.1 million tons in 1996.

Stimulating the activity was a 9.3 percent increase in the price of coal during 2005. The average price of $19.34 per ton was the highest it's been in 10 years, and significantly better than 2003's 30-year low of $16.64 per ton. Prices in 2006 are on pace to average $22.44 per ton, and Vanden Berg expects a 16 percent increase next year.

For coal companies, those numbers translated into revenues that reached $474.9 million in 2005, a 23 percent increase over the previous year. For miners, that means work. Employment in Utah rose from 1,523 jobs in 2004 to 1,803 last year; 2007 looks even better, closing in on 2,000.

"Our unemployment rate has dropped dramatically," said Carbon County's Fielding, reciting figures that fell from 6.3 percent in 2004, to 4.7 percent last year and to 3.6 percent in August, only slightly more than the state's overall average of 3.2 percent.

In his report, Vanden Berg noted that "all Utah mines either increased or maintained the same number of employees as in 2004."

Tain Curtis of Price has seen plenty of ups and downs in his 25 years as a coal miner.

"Today, if you want to be a coal miner, there's an opportunity to be a coal miner," said Curtis, who does advance work before mining begins in new sections of Energy West Mining Co.'s Deer Creek Mine. "In the mid-1980s, there was a big slump, and everybody was laying off. It was pretty steady in the '90s, but now we're back to where we were in the '70s. Everybody's hiring and everybody's producing. Economically, it's good for everybody."

Several mines, in particular, helped boost the state's coal picture.

Traditionally one of the state's bigger producers, the Skyline Mine in Carbon County was forced to close midway through 2004 when it was inundated with water percolating through the Wasatch Plateau. It yielded only 551,000 tons of coal, compared with 2.8 million the year before.

The mine's owner, St. Louis- based Arch Coal Co., and its local operator, Canyon Fuel, did not give in. They figured out ways to control or avoid the flooding and managed to reopen in February 2005. Although redevelopment work restricted the 2005 yield to 405,000 tons, the company pegs this year's production at 1.4 million tons.

Another of the company's mines, the Dugout Canyon operation in the Book Cliffs, picked up the slack for Skyline. Its production climbed by 800,000 tons. Canyon Fuel's mainstay, the SUFCO Mine on the Sevier County side of the Wasatch Plateau, yielded 7 millions tons of coal for the fifth straight year, holding onto its status as the country's sixth-largest underground coal mine.

In southern Emery County, Consolidation Coal Co. also reaped rewards for its patient development of the Emery Mine. Only 26,000 tons of coal were produced in 2002. As late as 2004, production was at 256,00 tons. Last year, crews removed 1.2 million tons of coal, a total expected to be surpassed slightly this year.

The biggest change for Utah's coal-mining industry involved Andalex Resources, which was acquired in August by Murray Energy Corp., an Ohio-based company that excavated about 6 million tons of coal in 2005. Adding Andalex's mines should double that annual output.

Although Andalex shut down its Pinnacle Mine in the northern Book Cliffs coal field in January, the adjacent Aberdeen Mine yielded 1.5 million tons in 2005. Production is projected to jump to 2.3 million tons this year because of technical advances that enable voracious longwalls to cut coal previously thought unreachable. The longwalls are high-powered machines that can excavate a seam from top to bottom with a cutting shear that goes back and forth the length of the machine, which can be up to 900 feet long.

"Equipment is mining at a depth of 2,800 feet [below the surface] with plans to approach a depth of 3,150 feet, which is deeper than any longwall machine has ever successfully been used in the U.S.," Vanden Berg said, noting that intricate roof-support and ventilation systems also have been developed to lessen the exposure of miners to rock falls and potentially deadly concentrations of methane gas at that depth.

Murray Energy also has acquired Andalex's partial ownership of the West Ridge Mine - which took 2.6 million tons of coal out of the Book Cliffs field last year - and of the Crandall Canyon and South Crandall Canyon mines in the Wasatch Plateau. The Crandall Canyon operations are nearing an end, but still yielded 1.8 million tons last year and will come close to matching that in 2006.

Ownership in those three mines is shared by the Intermountain Power Authority, a consortium of six California cities, 23 Utah municipalities, six rural Utah electrical cooperatives and Rocky Mountain Power. They run a coal-fired power plant near Lynndyl in Millard County that burns 5 million to 6 million tons of coal annually.

As a coal purchaser, IPA is not finding the current market favorable, said General Manager Reed Searle.

"Our coal costs have risen significantly over the past couple of years," he said, adding that coal from harder-to-reach areas contains higher concentrations of ash, making it more expensive to clean. Because Searle must secure coal for the next half century, he is concerned about dwindling reserves in the Wasatch Plateau and Book Cliffs fields.

"I would not say we're bullish in any way about the Utah coal industry. New coal reserves, due to environmental laws and other federal land restrictions, are more difficult to identify and obtain. You know what happened to those wonderful reserves at Kaiparowits. They're off the table."

Fielding and McCandless, the economic development officials in coal country, are more optimistic about Utah's long-term prospects. With the federal Energy Information Administration predicting coal prices will increase 1.9 percent annually between now and 2015, and 3 percent a year between 2015 and 2030, they believe companies will find ways to get whatever coal is available.

Noting that Emery County is dotted with wells pulling methane gas out of deep coalbeds, McCandless asked, "At what point is that coal recoverable? Today it's probably not. But as things change, who knows? Technology changes the paradigm constantly."

Added Fielding: "The demand for electricity will not go away. That demand will drive technology and the means to get that coal. I don't see us running out of minable coal in the near future because what is minable is constantly changing."

mikeg@sltrib.com