When officials cut the ribbon earlier this month to reopen the Fossil Rock Mine near Orangeville in Emery County, it marked the beginning of what Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA) officials hope will be a major source of income for the state’s Permanent School Fund.
The Trust Lands Administration originally acquired the coal reserves from the federal government in the 1998 Grand Staircase Escalante land exchange. The Fossil Rock Mine lessee, Fossil Rock Resources, which announced the reopening of the mine last fall, expects to eventually extract as many as 3 million tons of coal a year from the mine. Utah’s schoolchildren are the beneficiaries of Please log in to see the rest of this story.
