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The CEO of Cleveland Cliffs is just the latest U.S. voice to affirm the dirtiest fossil fuel’s unexpectedly bright future.
While the story of coal demand has been largely about rapid industrialization in Asia — especially India and China — the United States under President Trump has been working hard to make itself a main character.
Case in point is in Middletown, Ohio, where a one-time clean steel project may be refashioned as a standard-bearer for an industry-driven U.S. coal revival. The company behind the project, Cleveland-Cliffs, won a Biden-era award of up to $500 million to develop and deploy hydrogen-based technology for iron and steel production. CEO Laurenco Goncalves began casting doubt on that project as long ago as September, when he told Politico that he was struggling to find buyers willing to pay more for low-carbon materials, and that he wasn’t sure the project “even makes sense with the grants.” Earlier this year, he told investors that the company was working with the Department of Energy to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities.”
During an earnings call Monday morning, Goncalves said the company had scrapped the project not because of the DOE, but rather because it was unable to get sufficient hydrogen for use as fuel.
“The very first thing: It’s clear by now that we will not have availability of hydrogen. So there is no point in pursuing something that we know for sure that’s not going to happen,” Goncalves said. “We informed the DOE that we would not be pursuing that project.”
Instead, the company has had “a very good conversation” with the DOE “on revamping that project in a way that we preserve and enhance Middletown using beautiful coal, beautiful coke,” Goncalves said. (Where have we heard that kind of language before?) “We are vertically integrated, and we use American iron ore and American coal and American natural gas as feedstock, all produced right here in the United States of America, employing American workers,” he added.
The evidence for coal’s stubborn persistence globally has been mounting for years. In 2021, the International Energy Agency forecast that by 2024, annual coal demand would hit an all-time high of just over 8,000 megatons. In 2024, it reported that coal demand in 2023 was already at 8,690 megatons, a new record; it also pushed out its prediction for a demand plateau to 2027, at which point it predicted annual demand would be 8,870 megatons.
The IEA largely chalked up the results to the world’s energy needs, writing that “the power sector has been the main driver of coal demand growth, with electricity generation from coal set to reach an all-time high of 10 700 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2024.”
More recent analyses confirm that power demand, especially in Asia, could prop up global coal demand possibly for decades.
“Coal-fired power could be a bigger part of the energy mix for longer than expected, scuppering efforts to meet climate change goals,” a pair of Wood Mackenzie analysts, David Brown and Anthony Knutson, wrote in a report last week, echoing the IEA’s findings. China alone is responsible for almost three-quarters of global coal consumption, according to Wood Mackenzie. “New realities for energy markets in recent years have become more, not less, supportive of coal-fired power,” Brown and Knutson write.
The analysts put peak global coal demand a year earlier than the IEA, at 2026. But they also noted that “coal demand has consistently proven more resilient than expected.”
It’s possible that these fast-growing Asian nations could, for reasons of energy security or economy, decide to keep younger coal plants active for decades while extending the life of older plants to keep costs down. In this scenario, much of the world largely transitions away from using coal for power generation, but thanks to persistent Asian demand, global coal demand peaks as late as 2030. That could mean an extra 2 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions compared to a base case scenario.
The U.S. federal government, meanwhile, has taken on a role as both a coal-friendly analyst and an active promoter of every facet of the industry.
A couple of weeks ago, a Department of Energy report declared that “absent intervention, it is impossible” for the U.S. to power the growth of the artificial intelligence industry “while maintaining a reliable power grid and keeping energy costs low for our citizens.” That energy-poor status quo, the DOE argued, was due in part to scheduled retirements of coal-fired generation.
The DOE has been doing its part to keep that generation online, using its emergency authorities to keep some coal plants open. It has joined President Trump in becoming a kind of all-purpose pitch man for the industry. Over the weekend, the Department’s X account posted an image of Secretary of Energy Chris Wright with a shovel, copied and pasted in front of an open-pit mine, with the words “MINE, BABY, MINE.”
On the supply side, congressional Republicans tucked into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act a tax credit specifically for domestic metallurgical coal production, which could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Some of the largest end users of U.S.-mined metallurgical coal are outside the U.S., including the countries driving worldwide coal demand. India imported over 3 million tons of U.S. metallurgical coal in the first three months of 2025, with China just under a million, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.
The tie-up between Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel authorized in June, meanwhile, grants a “golden share” of the American company to the U.S. government, in part to ensure increased investment and capacity. That deal also explicitly provides for at least $1 billion of investment into U.S. Steel’s existing blast furnace operation, Mon Valley Works, in Western Pennsylvania. The investments “ensure Mon Valley Works operates for decades to come,” the company said in an announcement.
That means more coal: Mon Valley Works is the “largest coke manufacturing facility in the United States,” according to U.S. Steel, producing 4.3 million tons of the coal product both for its own operations and for sale to other steelmakers.
In an interview with Japanese media, Nippon Steel’s chief executive Eiji Hashimoto said that the newly expanded company will likely build a new steel mill in the U.S., as part of its goal to catch up in steel production with its Chinese rival China Baowu Steel Group Corp, while also using more of its existing capacity to increase production, hoping to eventually more than double its output by the middle of next decade.
(For what it’s worth, Japan is also a major importer of metallurgical coal from the United States, taking in just over a million tons in the first three months of 2025.)
While the future of coal will be determined in Asia, the U.S. steel industry is happy to work with the Trump administration and the coal industry to keep things burning.
“They see the value in blast furnaces just as we at Cleveland Cliffs do,” Cleveland-Cliffs’ Goncalves said of the U.S. industry’s new Japanese partners.
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Is the “turbine crisis” coming to an end? Or at least the end of the beginning?
One of the few bright spots for renewables this year has been that their main competitor for energy generation, natural gas, has been in a manufacturing crunch. An inability (or unwillingness) to ramp up production of turbines, the core component of a gas-fired power plant, to meet rising energy demand is cited regularly by industry executives and financiers to explain why renewables are the best solution to quickly getting power. And it’s reflected in the data; planned additions to the grid are overwhelmingly solar and storage.
But now there might be more turbines coming. Mitsubishi Heavy Industry chief executive Eisaku Ito told Bloomberg over the weekend that it aims to double its capacity to build gas turbines over the next two years.
The industry is essentially an oligopoly of three suppliers: Mitsubishi, GE Vernova, and Siemens Energy. Due to the high level of capital investment necessary to build turbines, there’s little chance of the triumvirate expanding. This means it’s a seller’s market. Developers describe having to be vetted by their suppliers for a product that might get delivered in five years, instead of suppliers fiercely competing for new business. That means for the turbine crisis to be truly reversed, executives (and investors) at Mitsubishi’s two competitors will have to be convinced that large-scale capacity expansions are worth it.
Something that might help them reach that conclusion is if capacity expansion plans are met with a higher stock price. In another ominous development for the renewable energy industry, Mitsubishi’s stock price went up in response to the news. Renewable developers have enough problems on their hands without having to worry about a gas turbine industry that could supply more and more megawatts over the medium term.
Gas turbine manufacturers have been trying to navigate the tension of fulfilling orders for new gas turbines and avoiding costly investments in new capacity that might not actually be utilized should the AI boom peter out, let alone if public policy makes it much more difficult to build new fossil-powered generation.
Up until now, manufacturers — and their investors — have seemed content with heavy demand and constrained supply. Going into the weekend, the stock prices of the gas turbine industry powerhouses GE Vernova, Siemens, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industry had risen 86%, 79%, and 69% so far this year.
But Mitsubishi Heavy Industry’s stock bump on Tuesday indicates that investors are not completely averse to capacity expansion. Yet at the same time, executives across the industry are careful to portray themselves as thoughtful and prudent stewards of capital.
Ito emphasized that the planned capacity expansion would not mean reckless investments, telling Bloomberg “the goal is to be as lean as possible” and that there would be work on the efficiency of the production process to address spiraling costs of turbine manufacturing.
“The executives seem keen to stress that this expansion will be lean and efficient,” Advait Arun, a climate and infrastructure analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise and the author of a much-cited Heatmap article on the turbine shortage, told me. “There’s a tension between getting over their skis by expanding overmuch while also killing the goose that’s laying their golden egg by not expanding.”
The pressure to build is immense — but so is the industry’s hard-won reticence about expansion.
Gas turbine orders are likely to hit a new record this year, according to S&P Global Commodities Insights, and the industry might be unwilling to go further.
“Past boom-and-bust cycles have made the industry cautious in its investments, and turbine demand in the early 2030s is uncertain,” S&P analysts wrote.
Siemens Energy chief executive Christian Bruch had told Morgan Stanley analysts in a note released Tuesday that the company had “no intention” of increasing capacity beyond working to expand the facilities it already has. He also said the company’s constraints are its own supply chain issues, namely the blades and vanes used in the turbines
And GE Vernova has been practically bragging about how far back they have reservations for turbines. “Our pipeline of activity for gas demand is only growing, but it is growing at even more healthy levels for 2029 deliveries, 2030, 2031,” the company’s chief executive Scott Strazik said on an earnings call in July.
And Wall Street has been happy to see developers get in line for whatever turbines can be made from the industry’s existing facilities. But what happens when the pressure to build doesn’t come from customers but from competitors?
A federal appeals court on Tuesday cleared the way for the Trump administration to kill former President Biden’s $20 billion green bank program, which would have provided low-cost loans for solar installations, building efficiency upgrades, and other local efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The three-judge panel overturned a lower court’s injunction temporarily requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to resume payments, and ruled that most of the plaintiffs’ claims were contract disputes and belonged in the Court of Federal Claims. If the case now moves to the Court of Federal Claims, the plaintiffs would only be able to sue for damages and any possibility of reinstating the grants would be gone. But they could also petition to appeal the decision.
Congress created the grants, known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. It authorized Biden’s EPA to award $20 billion to a handful of nonprofits that would then offer financing to individuals and organizations for emission-reduction projects, mostly geared toward low-income or otherwise disadvantaged communities. The agency fully obligated the funds last August to eight nonprofits that would “create a national financing network for clean energy and climate solutions across the country.”
Then Trump took office and ordered his agency heads to pause and review all funding for Inflation Reduction Act programs. EPA Secretary Lee Zeldin targeted the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Program for termination, making a big show of a covert recording of a former agency employee comparing Biden’s efforts to get climate money out the door after the election to “throwing gold bars off the edge” of the Titanic. Nevermind that this particular program had been fully obligated prior to the election, and recipients had already started to announce investments as early as October.
The nonprofit awardees sued the Trump administration, and the District Court for the District of Columbia issued a temporary injunction on the EPA’s grant terminations in mid-April, mandating that the funds continue to be paid out while the case proceeded. The EPA appealed that injunction, leading to today’s ruling.
In her opinion for the majority, appeals court Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, dismissed the nonprofits’ claims that the EPA’s grant terminations were arbitrary and capricious, in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act. She wrote that the dispute was “essentially contractual” and therefore did not belong in the district court to begin with. The nonprofits had also alleged that the EPA violated the constitution's separation of powers in attempting to cancel the grant agreements, as Congress had given explicit direction to the agency to award the funds by September 2024. While Judge Rao allowed that the district court had jurisdiction over this particular claim, she ruled that it was “unlikely to succeed” on the merits.
This decision, if it stands, means the case is basically over, David Super, an administrative law expert at Georgetown Law, told me. The plaintiffs could ask to have it transferred to the Court of Federal Claims if they wish to pursue monetary damages, but that’s likely a losing proposition since Judge Rao — unusually, according to Super — went on to opine that the plaintiffs would have no case there, either.
The plaintiffs could, however, ask for a rehearing by the full D.C. circuit. “Given that this is a very important case, both legally and practically, I think they would have a good chance of getting reheard,” Super said.
There was one other important point in the decision. While this case has been playing out, Congress rescinded any “unobligated” funding — money that hasn’t yet been spent or contracted out — from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund as part of Trump’s tax and spending law. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the remaining balance in the fund was just $19 million, essentially the cost of program administration. But the Trump administration has argued in the ongoing court case that the law rescinded the full $20 billion. Judge Rao disagreed, writing that the law “did not render this appeal moot.”
This is the latest in a series of wins for the Trump administration over the termination of grant funding. Last week, the D.C. district court dismissed a challenge brought by nonprofits over the termination of the Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grants, another Inflation Reduction Act program, on the grounds that it belonged in the Court of Federal Claims. The Supreme Court also issued a similar opinion in August regarding grant funding from the National Institutes of Health that was terminated on the grounds of a shift in agency priorities.
The evaporation of $20 billion in clean energy funding is no small loss, but Super said the consequences could also be much more systemic, threatening the viability of federal grantmaking as a tool to stimulate private capital. “If these commitments are utterly unenforceable, then no one's going to do business with the federal government,” he said.
On uranium challenges, Cadillac’s EV dreams, and a firefighter’s firestorm
Current conditions: Atlantic hurricane season enters its peak window and a zone west of Africa is under close monitoring for high risk tropical storm development this week • A polar air mass came down from Canada and dropped temperatures 15 degrees below historical averages in the Great Plains and the Northeastern U.S. • Croatia braces for floods as up to 11 inches of rain falls on the Balkans.
Add the Department of Transportation to the list of federal agencies waging what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman called “Trump’s total war on wind.” The Transportation Department said Friday it was eliminating or withdrawing $679 million in federal funding for 12 projects across the country designed to buttress development of offshore turbines. The funding included $427 million awarded last year for upgrading a marine terminal in Humboldt County, California, meant to be used for building and launching floating wind turbines. The list also included a $48 million offshore wind port on Staten Island, $39 million for a port near Norfolk, Virginia, and $20 million for a staging terminal in Paulsboro, New Jersey. “Wasteful, wind projects are using resources that could otherwise go towards revitalizing America’s maritime industry,” Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said in a statement. “Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg bent over backwards to use transportation dollars for their Green New Scam agenda while ignoring the dire needs of our shipbuilding industry.”
It’s just the Trump administration’s latest attack on wind. The Department of the Interior has led the charge, launching a witch hunt against any policies perceived to favor wind power, de-designating millions of acres of federal waters for offshore wind development, and kicking off an investigation into bird deaths near turbines. Last month, the Department of Commerce joined the effort, teeing up future tariffs with its own probe into whether imported turbines pose a national security threat to the U.S. In response, the Democratic governors of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey on Monday issued a statement calling on the administration “to uphold all offshore wind permits already granted and allow these projects to be constructed.”
Only a tiny percentage of plastic waste is recycled.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
In what the New York Times called a “sharp escalation” of its legal strategy to fend off liability for pollution, Exxon Mobil has countersued California, accusing the state’s landmark litigation over plastic waste of defaming the oil giant. At a court hearing last month, Exxon attorney Michael P. Cash described the lawsuit California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a cadre of environmental groups first filed last year as “an attack” aimed at the oil company’s home state of Texas and said the issue should be litigated there. As Times reporter Karen Zraick noted, Cash illustrated his point by displaying “a graphic showing a missile aimed at Texas from California” and by comparing Bonta and his nonprofit allies to “The Sopranos.”
Backed by a parallel lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club, Baykeeper, Heal the Bay, and the Surfrider Foundation, Bonta sued Exxon in state court on the grounds that the company had deceived Californians by “promising that recycling could and would solve the ever-growing plastic waste crisis,” alleging that the pollution had created a public nuisance and sought damages worth “multiple billions of dollars.” The lawsuit mirrors past litigation over planet-heating emissions, but targets the petrochemical division that has been one of the fastest-growing for Exxon and other oil giants. The courtroom drama came right as international negotiations in Geneva over a global treaty to curb plastic pollution failed after the United States joined Russia and other petrostates to block measures supported by more than 100 other nations that would have curbed production.
In North America, nuclear fuel may soon become harder to come by. Canadian uranium giant Cameco has warned that delays in ramping up production at its McArthur River mine in Saskatchewan could shrink its forecast output for the year. The move came just a week after one of the world’s other major suppliers of uranium, Kazakhstan’s state-owned miner Kazatomprom, announced plans to slash its production by 10% next year.
The pullback is happening right as the U.S. nuclear industry’s dealmaking boom is taking off. Now that Trump’s tax law assured that support for atomic energy would continue, Adam Stein from the Breakthrough Institute told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham that more reactor plans are coming. “We might have seen more deals earlier this year if there wasn’t uncertainty about what was going to happen with tax credits. But now that that’s resolved, I expect to hear more later this year,” he told Katie. That includes Europe. Despite similarly lethargic construction of reactors over the last three decades, France and Germany have finally united around the need for more atomic energy to power the continent’s energy transition. A pact signed at last week’s Franco-German summit “appears to herald rapprochement on reactors,” the trade publication NucNet surmised.
Once a stodgy gas-guzzling automaker, Cadillac refashioned itself as a luxury electric vehicle maker in recent years, rising alongside Chevrolet to put General Motors in the No. 2 slot behind Tesla. Roughly 70% of buyers who purchased the electric versions of the Cadillac Optiq or Lyriq switched from other luxury brands, including 10% who previously owned Tesla. That number could rise with Tesla’s brand loyalty nosediving, as this newsletter previously reported. “We’re in a position of great momentum,” John Roth, the global vice president of Cadillac, told The New York Times. “We offer more electric S.U.V.s than any luxury manufacturer, all with more than 300 miles of driving range.” But as Times reporter Lawrence Ulrich wrote, “that moment will soon be tested” as the electric car industry reels from the repeal of tax credits in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
The challenges ahead are best illustrated through the Escalade, Cadillac’s iconic luxury SUV. The company sold just 3,800 electric Escalade IQs in the first six months of the year. While that’s a strong showing for a three-row SUV starting around $130,000, the V-8 engine gas-powered Escalade starts at about $87,000, and sold about 24,000 vehicles – roughly six times as many as the electric version.
Lawyers in Oregon are demanding the release of a firefighter arrested last week by Border Patrol while fighting a wildfire in Washington state. The man, whose name hasn’t been released, was among two firefighters cuffed in the Olympic National Forest as they fought to contain the Bear Gulch Fire that had burned about 14 square miles as of Friday and forced evacuations. The arrests sparked a political firestorm over what critics saw as a jarring example of the warped priorities of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. That’s particularly so in the case of this firefighter, who attorneys said had received his U-Visa certification from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Oregon in 2017 and had submitted his U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services application the following year.
When the AP asked the Bureau of Land Management why its contracts with two firefighting companies were terminated and 42 firefighters were escorted away from Washington’s largest wildfire, the agency declined to comment. The decisions came as the American West is essentially a tinderbox. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported, Washington and Oregon are both at high risk of a megafire igniting this fall.
Turns out mammoths weren’t just in the icy tundra. Scientists in Mexico discovered mammoth bones, shedding light on a once-obscure population of extinct tropical elephantids that ranged as far south as Costa Rica. In a paper published this week in Science, National Autonomous University of Mexico paleogenomicist Federico Sánchez Quinto documented the previously unknown lineage of the Santa Lucía mammoths, which he said split from northern Columbian mammoths hundreds of thousands of years ago. “If you had told me 5 years ago that I would be collecting these samples, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy,’” he said. “This paper really is an exciting beginning of something.”