TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – US iron-ore producer Cliffs Natural Resources has completed the sale of its Logan County Coal assets, in West Virginia, to a subsidiary of Coronado Coal for $174-million in cash, including assuming certain liabilities.

Cliffs on Friday said it expected a tax benefit associated with the transaction of between 20% and 25% of the previously disclosed pretax loss of about $400-million, which represented an additional benefit of $80-million to $100-million in future cash tax savings.

NYSE-listed Cliffs would record the results of this sale in its fourth-quarter earnings.

Cliffs also confirmed on Friday that active production at Bloom Lake, in Eastern Canada, had completely stopped and that its exit from the region continued to be executed on schedule.

The mine had transitioned to care-and-maintenance status and, as a result, only a small number of employees remained on the payroll. Cliffs expected the last iron-ore shipment out of the Port of Sept-Iles to be completed early this month.

“The execution of the strategic initiatives outlined during our third-quarter conference call in October 2014 [have] continued to progress as planned during the last two months. The sale of Logan County Coal, which included a meaningful tax benefit to the company, clearly demonstrates our ability to execute complex transactions despite an adverse mergers and acquisitions environment for commodity-related transactions.

“Additionally, as we approach the final steps of our exit from Eastern Canada, we have brought to an end the flawed expansion that has cost Cliffs and its shareholders billions of dollars,” Cliffs chairperson, president and CEO Lourenco Goncalves said.

He emphasised that as the company became increasingly focused on being a significant supplier of iron-ore to the American steel industry, with no US iron-ore contracts resetting in 2015 or 2016, no portion of its public debt maturing until 2018 and a strong 2015 economic forecast for the US, “we believe that we are better positioned than any other iron-ore mining company in the world to deliver profits in 2015”.