History
Dry Fork Mine
The Dry Fork Mine was established in February 1989 with the first coal shipping in September 1990. This mine resides on approximately 10,800 of total surface acres located north of Gillette, WY with approximately 6,300 acres within the permit area. It has a total reserve base in excess of 250 million tons, which guarantees its customers a long-term affordable fuel source.
In 2010, the Dry Fork Mine became a single-member nonprofit cooperative with Western Fuels Association being its sole member. Western Fuels Association is also a nonprofit cooperative providing fuel supply chain management and other services for the generation of electricity by consumer owned utilities. The cooperative principle is strength in numbers, so in this organization member-owners are rural electric generation and transmission cooperatives, municipal utilities and other public power entities striving to provide low-cost electric power to their respective customers.
In 2011, the Dry Fork Mine expanded its production when Basin Electric Power Cooperative’s Dry Fork Station went online. The Dry Fork Mine supplies the Dry Fork Station via overland conveyor directly from the Mine’s plant facilities. The Dry Fork Station has an output of approximately 385 megawatts supplying 308,000 homes in the northeast Wyoming area.
Western Fuels Association
Western Fuels is a not-for profit cooperative that supplies coal and transportation services to consumer-owned electric utilities throughout the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain and Southwest regions. Serving a wide variety of public power entities ranging from rural electric generation and transmission cooperatives to municipal utilities, WFA offers its Members diverse and extensive expertise in coal mining, coal procurement and transportation management.
Western Fuels Association, founded in 1973, is a cooperative enterprise operating on a not-for profit basis to provide coal and other services for the generation of electricity by consumer owned utilities. Where WFA intends to expand its membership base to include investor-owned utilities and industrial consumers of coal, current member-owners are rural electric generation and transmission cooperatives, municipal utilities and other public power entities.
For more than four decades Western Fuels has utilized its considerable and diverse experience to provide comprehensive fuel chain management services to a progressive membership that today includes Basin Electric Power Cooperative, Kansas Board of Public Utilities, the Board of Public Municipal Utilities of Sikeston, Mo, Sunflower Electric Power Corporation, and Southern Minnesota Municipal Power Agency.
