Robert Murray is pumped – as though coal-fired steam might be coursing through his veins. Striding purposefully, he ascends a lectern in a conference room at Pittsburgh’s Wyndham Grand Downtown hotel, toting a cardboard box with hundreds of copies of his keynote speech to give out later, lest anyone misses a word.

It turns out to be a corporate version of a hellfire-and-damnation sermon for the 250 US coal executives assembled at the Platts Coal Marketing Days conference. Satan and his minions are not in the room, but Murray knows their names. “Environmental alarmists” and “liberal elitists”, he says, his voice rising as he whips off his glasses. And worse than them all, “the insane, regal administration of King [Barack] Obama” and Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency.

Murray, 74, pauses for effect and then lowers his voice. “We have the absolute destruction of the US coal industry. It isn’t coming back. It’s permanent. Virtually all of it is permanent. And if you think it’s coming back, you don’t understand the business. Or you’re smoking dope.”

This is vintage Murray, America’s procoal provocateur-in-chief, a coal miner’s son and a former miner himself, a man whose antiregulation record is so unwavering that he once dismissed acid rain as a hoax, never mind climate change.

His warnings are all the more interesting when framed against what Murray, CEO and owner of Murray Energy, is actually doing. For all the doom and gloom, he is gorging on coal mines – Murray Energy last autumn spent $3.5-billion to acquire five of Consol Energy’s West Virginia operations.

It was the biggest deal in the beleaguered coal sector in two-and-a-half years, catapulting his Ohio-based company into the country’s fifth- largest coal producer and making Murray Energy America’s largest privately held coal producer. Ever since, Murray has been on a tear, ramping up production at his newly acquired mines as he ratchets up his rhetoric in defence of his beleaguered industry and against Obama’s ‘War on Coal’. Yet, if war is hell, Murray seems to smell something else in the air besides brimstone – money. Make no mistake about it, Murray has a plan. Statistics indicate that it has been a terrible decade for coal. The market capitalisation of the entire industry has shrunk from $78- billion in 2011 to about $25-billion today. Coal now generates 37% of the country’s electricity – down from over 50% in 2007.

Still, 37% represents at least a $30-billion a year industry and even as that pie shrinks, huge profits will accrue to those who stay the course. Even globally, coal’s lot is always more complicated than the dire prophesies of both its detractors and advocates. Consider that Germany – with the world’s most ambitious green energy programme – has gone back to burning copious amounts of dirty lignite to make up for the shortfall in electricity being caused by the phase-out of its nuclear power plants.

So, in the US, as rival coal producers get battered by stiffer emissions regulations, production cutbacks and debt drives many into bankruptcy, Murray sees nothing but opportunity. He will be feasting on the losers. “He was preparing for the regulatory regime before anyone really knew what was coming,” said Ted O’Brien, the New York-based CEO of Doyle Trading Consultants. “He’s going to be one of the last-standing US producers, no doubt.”

For Murray, coal mining is among the noblest of pursuits – a real job filled with dignity and honour, a job that has a multiplier effect of other employment in good old-fashioned American communities, and one that is, above all, the leading source of low-cost electricity, the bedrock for American success.

Murray has never known anything else. Growing up in small towns on the western banks of the Ohio river, he was nine when his father was paralysed from the neck down in a mining accident. Far from recoiling from the field, Murray was drawn to it. When his mother later contracted breast cancer, he started mowing lawns to support the family. He would strap a coal miner’s lamp to see where he was going in the night.

Murray went into the mines himself at 17 on his way to being named valedictorian of Bethesda High School. And though the nearby towns offered to send him to medical school if he would come back and replace the local doctor, he chose instead to study mine engineering at Ohio State on a $6 500 scholarship from North American Coal.

He worked for North American Coal for 31 years, climbing the ranks fast enough to oversee 7 000 employees by the time he was 30. He would go on to mine lignite in Texas and Wyoming, work a on coal gasification project in North Dakota and, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, help build the Powhatan No 6 mine, in eastern Ohio, a couple of dozen miles from his childhood home.

He worked himself up to CEO and, in his telling, was fired in October 1987 after he had refused to support the company’s plan to reincorporate in Delaware and shed obligations to some 1 800 retirees, whom Murray had spent years working alongside. North American Coal said at the time that it changed CEOs as part of a broader strategy to diversify into noncoal operations.

In spring 1988, Murray took a $66-million loan, mortgaged his home and bought the Powhatan No 6 mine himself. He rechristened the operating unit the Ohio Valley Coal Company and told investors he would install miles of conveyor belts, put in state-of-the-art longwall mining machinery and ramp up yearly coal production to 4.3- million tons from 1.2-million tons.

Even then, Murray lashed out at what he saw as meddling from politicians and regulators. A growing call by environmentalists to bolster the Clean Air Act was, in his opinion, just another travesty being foisted upon his misunderstood industry. Murray opposed measures seeking to limit what he still dismisses as “so-called acid rain”. In an interview back then, he blasted proposals to toughen US emissions standards as “criminal fraud” being perpetrated by a “terrible government and a terrible President.” He was referring to George H W Bush.

All the while, Murray was devising a strategy to capitalise off it. He recognised early that power plants had a choice to make: either install expensive scrubbers to reduce sulphur dioxide and other emissions to comply with the law or start buying low-sulphur coal from as far away as Wyoming. He identified which plants were the likeliest to install scrubbers, then went about buying as much of the coal reserves those retrofitted plants would require as he could. He told plant owners he would be able to sell them coal so cheap that they would wind up coming out ahead, even after they had invested in the scrubber technology.

There was a bonus to this: back then, the medium- and high-sulphur coal Murray was after, plentiful in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Utah, was cheap. It is a story Murray loves to tell, full of market foresight and a devotion to reducing costs. He recounted it at the Pittsburgh conference, declaring that it had everything to do with 2014, 2015 and beyond.

These days, the power plants he is targeting are the ones too important to be taken off the grid and too expensive to convert to natural gas. “That same strategy will carry me into the future,” he said.

Still, Murray has a lot more riding on his gamble this time around. He has a staff of 7 400 people, including his three adult sons, who are in management. He has 12 active underground mines and a fleet of 23 tow boats and 600 barges that deliver coal from five riverside transloading facilities to baseload power plants, most of them located in the Midwest.

He manufactures the bulk of his own equipment at factories in Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia. Murray says the advantage of that is it can lower production costs by a third, while doubling the machinery’s life expectancy.

During 2014, fuelled in part by his acquisition of Consol mines, Murray expected to mine 64-million tons of coal, worth about $3.6- billion – up from revenue of $1.3- billion in 2012, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

All this is run from St Clairsville, the titular home to Murray Energy’s headquarters. It could pose for a Midwestern postcard. Ten miles west of the Ohio river, the town of 5 000 sits amidst a countryside of rolling hills, farmhouses and twisting, two-lane roads. Its manicured downtown, anchored by the towering, ornate Belmont County Courthouse, exudes a prosperity with bustling shops and busy restaurants.

Murray has his own tower but he decided to build it about three miles west of town and it reflects his sensibilities. A tall, boxy, utilitarian building, it sits nonetheless on an impressive sprawl of neat lawns sprouting ponds and fountains – and most of it ringed by fences.