The employment impacts include temporary lay-offs of approximately 415 employees at the Wolverine mine, about 280 employees at Brazion and other administrative support staff, according to Walter Energy CEO Walter J Scheller III.

He said a limited number of employees would remain at each site to operate the preparation plants and, once coal processing was complete, to perform ongoing equipment maintenance and provide ongoing security for the sites during the idle period.

“These lay-offs are particularly unfortunate because our employees have worked very hard to keep these mines competitive in the face of daunting market conditions,” Scheller said.

“Equally important, they've worked safely.

“These coal reserves remain valuable assets.

“However, given the current met coal pricing environment, our best course of action at this time is to idle these operations until we can achieve reasonable value from these reserves.”

The company expects to incur severance charges of approximately $US7 million ($A7.5 million) in the second quarter of 2014 in connection with the idling of the mines.

Brazion, which includes the operations of Brule and Willow Creek, will continue to operate the Brule mine but expects to idle the mine by July 2014.

The company will continue to operate its preparation plants at these mines to complete processing of coal that has already been mined and is in inventory.

For 2013, coal production from Wolverine, which produces mid-volatile hard coking coal, was 1.6 million tonnes, while the Brazion mines produced approximately 1.9Mt of low-volatile pulverised coal injection coal and 100,000 tonnes of hard coking coal.

As of December 31, 2013, Walter Energy had approximately 1.1Mt of coal in inventory in Canada.