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ARGENTINA: Boost for Coal Mine Revives Stagnant Town

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Feb 13 2008 (IPS) - With winter temperatures that plunge to 20 degrees below zero, the small Argentine town of Río Turbio, 3,000 kilometres southwest of Buenos Aires, would not exist but for the coal beneath its soil.

The state-owned coal company, Yacimientos Carboníferos Fiscales (YCF), was responsible for founding the town in the mid-20th century, drawing around a thousand people. Its coal mine, the richest in the country, was a sleeping giant until it was awakened by a tragedy.

At first the town, located in the province of Santa Cruz, close to the Andes mountains, grew steadily. Forty years later, it had over 10,000 people.

But then the decline began. The wave of privatisations in the 1990s put the Río Turbio Coal Company in the hands of a private concession, Yacimiento de Carbón de Río Turbio (YCRT), that exploited the coal without investing in the mine, and downsized the work force. Many miners emigrated, unable to find any alternative work.

“It was a terrible time, and not just because of the threat of closure. Our rights were eroded,” Juan Pablo Neto, a trade unionist who has worked in the mine for 25 years, told IPS in a telephone conversation from Río Turbio. “Some 1,500 workers were tempted to leave by the incentives offered in the ‘voluntary retirement’ package, and in a few months they had nothing.”

In 2004, when the concession ran out, the lack of investment and maintenance took a cruel toll. Fourteen miners died trapped underground. The accident was a turning point: from then on Río Turbio climbed back out of the doldrums.


Former President Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), who was born in Santa Cruz and was three times governor of the province, set active state intervention in motion. In three years, one billion dollars were invested and coal production rose threefold.

Now the coal mine is attracting workers again. “Many of those who left are coming back,” said Neto, who is secretary of the Río Turbio Public Employees’ Association. The town now has 15,000 residents, and another 6,000 people live in the nearby town of 28 de Noviembre.

An operative at the YCRT now earns 3,600 pesos (1,200 dollars) a month. And from March, the workday will be reduced from eight to six hours.

It is an attractive offer for a town in the middle of nowhere, which has only one supermarket, and is windy and cold for almost half of the year.

Pensioners’ rights have also been restored. Given the dangerous and unhealthy working conditions, miners retire at 50, or after 25 years with the company. But pensions used to be low.

Now retired coal miners will be the first to benefit from a law under which pensioners will receive 82 percent of their former wages. No other group of workers in Argentina is enjoying the new arrangement yet.

However, the Argentine branch of the environmental watchdog Greenpeace International advises against investing in fossil fuels. “The government is choosing the worst possible options: building large dams, reactivating nuclear power stations and producing coal,” activist Rosario Espina told IPS.

Burning coal is one of the forms of energy production that emits the most carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, exacerbating global warming. “However good the technology used may be, it’s still a fossil fuel,” said Espina.

But the government has redoubled its efforts in this direction. In December, the newly-sworn-in President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner went to Río Turbio to announce the building of a coal-fired power plant next to the mine. The thermoelectric plant will produce 240 megawatts, to be fed into the national grid.

A consortium led by Spanish firm Isolux Corsán won the contract to build the power station in September. Construction will take five years, and around one thousand workers will be needed.

When finished, the plant will require about a hundred workers, while creating another 500 indirect jobs.

“Three hundred workers’ houses have to be built, as well as storage areas, cafeterias and everything the power plant building requires,” Neto enthused.

When it is up and running, the plant will consume 1.2 million tons of coal a year. Current output at the coal mine is close to 500,000 tons, much more than the 110,000 tons mined in 2004 but still well below the plant’s needs, so coal production will have to be doubled in five years.

There is plenty of coal, with reserves estimated at between 1.5 and two billion tons.

“The power plant is something we’ve been asking for all our lives. It’ll secure our future, and that of our children and grandchildren,” said Neto.

The Ministry of Federal Planning forecasts that in the next few years, “five percent of the country’s electricity will come from Río Turbio,” announced Minister Julio De Vido after launching the National Energy Plan, which predicts work will be ongoing until 2013.

“It’s a source of pride for us to produce electricity for the whole country, and send it to Río Gallegos (the provincial capital, 300 kilometres from Río Turbio) or El Calafate,” a fast-growing tourist resort town and the gateway to the spectacular Perito Moreno glacier, said Neto.

But he also thinks it will be possible to export electricity to Chile, which is close to the coal mine, and to improve production conditions in Río Turbio for factories that want to set up shop there.

At present, coal is transported by train to Río Gallegos, shipped by boat to Buenos Aires and then exported.

It used to take 14 hours to get the coal to Río Gallegos, but now it takes eight.

However, using all the coal at the power plant next to the mine will be a radical change.

“It won’t need any treatment. It will be used just as it comes out of the mine,” he said. The power plant will produce ashes which can be used to manufacture bricks and ceramic products. “When we have that energy available, factories will be interested in establishing themselves here,” Neto said.

Neto was born in Mendoza, a province in western Argentina, and moved to Santa Cruz looking for work when he was 20 years old.

“I hitchhiked here, with a backpack and no money, looking for an oil company, but soon I was working in the coal mine,” he said.

“In recent years, investments have been made in machinery that enabled us to increase production a great deal, but our future will be secure the day the power plant we long for so much is opened. Without that, what chance has this little town got? It’s so out of sight and out of mind,” he said.

 
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