Gunvor, the commodities trader founded by Gennady Timchenko and Torbjorn Tornqvist, has acquired a coal asset in the United States.

Pinesdale LLC, a unit of Gunvor Group, has paid $400 million for a one-third interest in the Signal Peak coal mine in Montana, one of the sellers, U.S. firm FirstEnergy Corp. reported in a press release. FirstEnergy will receive $260 million of the selling price and the remainder will go to private coal firm Boich.

FirstEnergy and Boich bought Signal Peak in 2008. At the time, FirstEnergy paid $125 million for a 45% stake in the project.

The deal with Gunvor calls for creating a new corporate entity, Global Mining Holding Company, in which the three investors will each own a one-third interest.

“One of the key advantages that Gunvor Group brings to this venture is the ability to utilize their commodity trading relationships in such markets as Japan, China, Korea and Chile to sell more coal,” Wayne Boich Jr., president and chief executive of Boich Companies, was quoted as saying in the release.

This is Gunvor’s first investment in a coal mine in the United States, Gunvor S.A. chairman Timothy Legge said. The trader can ship large amounts of coal through the deepwater port of Vancouver.

Under the deal, FirstEnergy Generation, a subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corp., has revised its original coal purchase agreement with Signal Peak to reduce annual purchases from 6.8 million to 1.8 million tons. Most of the coal from the mine will now be purchased by Gunvor.

Signal Peak now mines more than 8 million tons of thermal coal per year, but this figure is expected to grow to 13.5 million tons by 2015.

Tornqvist said in an interview with Vedomosti in October that Gunvor is currently closing a number of deals with coal assets in various markets. Coal is a particular category of commodity and a trader should have a portfolio of its own coal assets in order to be successful, he said.

In Russia, Gunvor is an investor in the Kolmar coal holding. Gunvor had long been considered a possible suitor for coal miners Raspadskaya (RTS: RASP) and SDS, but Tornqvist said the company was not interested in other coal assets in Russia besides Kolmar.