Utah's Headwaters completes sale of coal cleaning plants

Headwaters Inc., a South Jordan-based building products company, said it has completed the sale of its eight remaining coal cleaning facilities to Bowie Refined Coal and its affiliates.

Proceeds from the sale include approximately $3.8 million in cash at closing with an additional $10 million to be paid by the end of 2013.

Under terms of the sale, Bowie agreed to pay Headwaters potential royalties and deferred purchase price totaling up to $43.7 million over the next eight years.

"We are pleased to have completed the sale of all of our coal cleaning facilities," Kirk A. Benson, Headwaters' CEO, said in a statement announcing the deal. "In addition to eliminating a distraction from our light building products and heavy construction materials business, this transaction generates cash to further strengthen our balance sheet."

Headwaters' coal-cleaning technology is designed to address the problems associated with more than 6,000 massive heaps of low-grade coal known as "gob piles" that are found in coal mining regions throughout the country.

Untreated, those mounds, which contain an estimated 3 billion to 5 billion tons of coal, are of little value because they contain too much ash, sulphur and mercury.