Driving through the coal towns of the Panther Valley, it’s clear that there is an active surface mining operation taking place.

But outside of those who work the mine, and some curious explorers, most people don’t know how expansive it really is.Lehigh Anthracite Inc. owns permits to 7,000-plus acres in the Panther Valley, land that has been mined for more than 200 years.“A lot of people that I take up on site are usually pretty amazed at how big of an operation we have, but when you drive by on 209, you barely even notice it,” Rusty Taylor, president and CEO of Lehigh Anthracite, said.Today’s Lehigh, founded in 2010, carries on the name of a company that was founded not long after United States gained independence, and fueled the Industrial Revolution with Anthracite Coal.In its peak around 1917, 10,000 miners produced more than a million tons of coal per year.Those miners are legendary for their determination and grit, literally carving a living out of the ground in shafts that stretched deep into the earth.Today’s miners use modern technology to stay competitive in a market even as oil and natural gas have surpassed anthracite as the preferred method of home heating.“We’re doing everything in big machinery, we’re not doing it with muscle power anymore,” Taylor said.Anthracite represents about 1 percent of the coal mined in the world. While there are other deposits in countries like Ukraine and South Africa, eastern Pennsylvania has the largest deposits in the world, according to Taylor.The Panther Valley patch is one of the largest contiguous mined areas.“It’s a very rich property. I’m just the latest group, the latest company taking in that return of mining this property,” Taylor said.It sells for a lot more than its softer counterpart, bituminous coal, which is used for steel production and coal power plants. It also has more applications in industrial plants, Taylor says, whether it’s recycling steel or filtering the chlorine taste out of municipal tap water.And while much of the bituminous mining process is mechanized, anthracite takes more painstaking work.Today’s anthracite mining operations are conducted largely with huge earth moving equipment, assisted by a fair amount of blasting.“We’ve got guys sitting in air-conditioned, dust resistant cabs, listening to the radio and loading 20 yards of rock at a time,” he said.At the center of the property, just north of Coaldale borough, there’s a massive pit where miners are digging the ‘Mammoth’ vein. The coal veins roughly follow the path of the valley itself, dipping in the middle.“We try to describe it as a big canoe. The geology comes out of the ground to the north, and comes out to the south of us, and goes deep beneath us. and we have veins of anthracite in that geology,” Taylor said.Excavators remove the raw coal. “Shovels” — huge machines that can fill a 100-ton truck in less than a minute — dig out the surrounding rock, which is then used to fill areas that have already been mined.As they dig, they follow the paths of their forebears. In one area, they uncovered the remnants of a mine shaft that Taylor says dates back to the mid 19th Century.Trucks ferry the raw coal to the coal processing plant, traditionally known as a breaker.The No. 14 breaker is located just east of Tamaqua. Built in the 1960s, It is literally the 14th such breaker in the Panther Valley.Inside, they use an ingenious solution to separate the coal from the rock and wood — it floats on top of a water solution containing chemicals, while the rocks sink to the bottom.For home heating, there are various sizes — from small barley sized to the appropriately named egg sized.In a month, they will turn 40,000 raw tons of coal into 20,000 clean tons, which are ready to be loaded onto trucks for local delivery, or rail cars for industrial use.At that rate, there is about 150 years worth of coal left in the ground in the valley.Taylor says his business has gotten a lot of attention since now-President Trump touted a return of coal jobs while on the campaign trail. He said the best thing for the industry would be an increase in demand, and therefore price. But he said there could be indirect benefits of the new administration as well.“My two buzzwords since the election have been ‘hopeful’ and ‘optimistic,’ but none of that has translated into a better selling price, higher volumes or anything like that. We just feel that as the economy goes up, we’re gonna go up with it — a high tide raises all boats, so to speak.”