By Bill Archer

Coal people understand the national spotlight, but the national media doesn’t always understand the understated, deadpan humor that weaves its way through most working people.

On the day that Mike Quillen, president and chief executive officer of Abingdon, Virginia-based Alpha Natural Resources Inc., was set to make a major announcement concerning a dramatic, five-point employee retention plan that would make Alpha’s 3,600 coal miners part owners in the company, he cracked a joke that was too subtle for a television production to catch.

“They were getting me ready to do a spot on CNBC ‘Squawk Box’ this morning, and after getting me all dolled up, I asked them if they could do something about this accent,” Quillen said. Quillen is a Gate City native who started out working at a coal mine in his Wise County, Virginia home. Brooks Run Mining’s Cucumber Mine isn’t far away from the Southwest Virginia coalfields where Quillen got his start, but the employee retention plan he announced on April 30, 2008, is the kind of program that would entice a modern coal miner to resist being lured away in an industry that is suddenly starving for quality, experienced employees. Traditional supply and demand free enterprise principles have emerged to set a new direction for the coal industry – an industry that has reinvented itself scores of times through the past 140 years.

“It’s not easy to explain our business to Wall Street,” Quillen said after arriving in Cucumber via helicopter and before talking with the day and evening shift coal miners. “We’re on an up-cycle now, and we’ve seen them before. Anyone who has experience and wants to work in the coal industry is already working. Now, you can’t find people to bring new properties on line to take advantage of the new opportunities unless you steal them from somebody else.

“You can do a detailed business model that reflects that reality, but it’s hard to explain,” he said. “We think a rewards program like this will help us hold on to the experienced, good coal miners that we have. We’ve all been here before. This is where my roots are. If you think it makes me happy to get the benefits to these guys … the guys who really do the work … then you are right.”

Although he has been in the spotlight before and understands Wall Street as well as CNBC, Quillen knows the coal business as well. He acquired the Cucumber Mine property from legendary McDowell County coal man Eddie Asbury, who knew it was a big block of untouched Pocahontas No. 3 seam metallurgical coal that wasn’t developed in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s when coal was in the driver’s seat of global energy policy. The pendulum has turned again, and as the world’s appetite for energy continues to grow, coal remains the only logical choice to meet that demand.

Quillen’s background in the industry starts from the underground, and moves on up, but he counts guys like the late Bill Skewes and other coal men who never lost faith in the business during the hard times in the 1980s, as the industry leaders who planted the seeds for the coal renaissance that is now taking place.