Peabody Energy was the world's largest coal company — the coal bust bankrupted it

Peabody Energy was founded in 1883 as Peabody, Daniels & Company in Chicago and grew to become the largest private coal company in the world. For over a century it mined the coal that powered America's industrial growth, operating mines across the United States and Australia. At its peak it sold roughly 250 million tons of coal per year and employed 7,100 people, supplying fuel to power plants and steel mills on every continent.

The company's decline tracked coal's: the shale gas revolution of the late 2000s drove natural gas prices so low that gas-fired power plants became cheaper to run than coal plants, even without counting environmental costs. Between 2008 and 2015, dozens of US coal-fired power plants announced closures. Peabody reported net losses exceeding $500 million annually for each year from 2012 through 2015, including a nearly $2 billion loss in 2015 alone.

The company had borrowed heavily to acquire Australian coal assets when prices were high in 2011 — buying Macarthur Coal for $5.1 billion in a joint venture. Global coal prices then collapsed as China's demand slowed. By early 2016, Peabody was burdened with roughly $6 billion in debt and $1.5 billion in self-bonding obligations for mine reclamation. It could not service the debt on shrinking revenues.

Peabody filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 13 April 2016, in St. Louis. The company held approximately $11 billion in assets against $6.3 billion in debt. It emerged from bankruptcy on 3 April 2017, having shed billions in debt and cancelled its old equity. The reorganisation preserved the core mining operations but the company emerged as a smaller, chastened version of the global giant it had once been.