Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Energy

Trump Can’t Save Coal From Natural Gas

The president’s executive order is already too late to save at least one Arizona plant.

An open coal plant.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Trump administration is trying to save coal again. But despite the president’s seemingly forceful actions, there’s little indication he’ll be any more successful at it this time than he was the last time around.

Backed by coal miners in hard hats and high visibility jackets, Trump on Tuesday announced a series of executive orders meant to boost “beautiful, clean coal.” The orders lift barriers to extracting coal on public lands, ask the Department of Energy to consider metallurgical coal a critical mineral, push out compliance with some air quality rules by two years, instruct the Department of Energy to use emergency authorities to keep coal plants open, and direct the attorney general to go after state climate laws that Trump claimed “discriminate” against greenhouse gas-emitting energy sources like coal.

What’s not clear is how much these orders will boost the coal industry, let alone save it. It’s not even clear whether the specific plant Trump said he was saving will burn coal again.

During the announcement, Trump said that his administration would keep open the Cholla Generating Station, an Arizona coal plant that began operating in 1962. The plant’s final two units were slated to be retired this year.

“We will ensure our nation’s critical coal plants remain online and operational,” Trump said. “To that end, I’m instructing Secretary Wright to save the Cholla coal plant in Arizona.”

But according to Arizona Public Service, the utility that co-owns the plant, the plant has already stopped generating power. A spokesperson told me the utility was “aware” of the president’s statement and is “evaluating what it means for the plant.” APS plans on preserving the site, possibly for nuclear power and has “procured reliable and cost-effective generation that will replace the energy previously generated by Cholla Power Plant,” the spokesperson said.

The Department of Energy didn’t return a request for comment.

Trump’s orders repeatedly cite Section 202 of the Federal Power Act, which allows the Secretary of Energy “during a continuance of a war in which the United States is engaged or when an emergency exists” to allow energy facilities to continue to operate on a temporary basis that otherwise would not.

In 2017, the first Trump administration used Section 202 to allow two coal plant units in Virginia to continue operating occasionally when necessary for grid reliability, despite their having been due to close to comply with air quality regulations. Two years later, the electricity market PJM told the Department of Energy that a new transmission line had rendered the emergency authorization unnecessary, and the plants closed in 2019.

The executive orders “don’t seem to realize that natural gas killed coal and if they aren’t banning fracking, none of this matters,” Grid Strategies president Rob Gramlich wrote on X. “Nothing here seems to change the economics, and it’s the economics that have held coal-fired power production down.” (Gramlich is also a Heatmap contributor.)

Of course, the United States has plenty of coal. But many of its uses — including electricity generation — can be easily substituted with other sources, such as natural gas. That’s why U.S. coal production has been falling since 2008.

“Coal is increasingly uncompetitive in deregulated electricity markets,” Seaver Wang, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, told me. That’s because operating a coal-fired power plant comes with all sorts of extra costs that natural gas doesn’t, including the transportation and storage of coal — compare the barges and trains required to move rocks to the neat pipelines gas flows through. The energy research group Energy Innovation has found that nearly all coal plants are more expensive to run than the combinations of wind, solar, and storage that might replace them.

“I don’t see the demand drivers for this to remotely bring coal back. I have no idea who would ever invest as a result of this executive order or related policies,” Wang said.

While existing coal plants may stick around for another few years as a result of heightened demand or relaxed regulatory burdens, that’s a far cry from building new coal plants or opening new coal mines. A large coal plant hasn’t opened in the United States since 2013. In 2024, wind and solar generation surpassed coal generation on the grid, according to Ember.

Some 12.3 gigawatts of coal capacity are scheduled to be retired in 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration, making up two-thirds of planned retirements by capacity this year. But coal retirements have also been slowing down, according to EIA data. The 7.5 gigawatts retired last year was the least since 2011.

Jefferies analysts estimated that over 12 gigawatts of coal capacity is due for retirement in 2028. That could be pushed back thanks to the relaxation of the mercury and air toxics rules the president announced Tuesday.

“There is logic to delaying coal retirements to serve incremental high-density load customers like data centers,” the Jefferies analysts wrote. “Not all coal retirements are alike, and the economic-driven transitions will continue to draw support, but the calculus will change with more expensive renewables and natural gas alternatives from tariffs and potential changes to the Inflation Reduction Act.”

This is not the first time a Trump White House has tried to rescue this declining industry. During his first term, then Secretary of Energy Rick Perry proposed that coal and nuclear plants at risk of closing because of low demand have guaranteed payments, known as cost recovery, in order to stay open. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, with a Republican majority, said no to Perry by a vote of 5-0.

Despite the president’s promises throughout his campaign, the coal industry shrunk by a huge degree during his first term, part of a longer trend that brought down coal’s share in the electricity generating sector from about half in 2007 to 16% in 2023. During Trump’s time in office, coal mining jobs declined from 51,000 to 38,000 during the pandemic, and have recovered only to 40,000 today.

When it comes to mines, Wang said, investors would likely be leery of putting money into the sector, given the strong likelihood that a future Democratic administration would be far less friendly to coal. Coal investors “are going to be accounting for the fact that any policy swings are short lived,” Wang told me.

“We all know that lead times for mines are long. Everyone knows this administration only has four years in office. I don’t really expect that this will drive a lot of investment interest,” Wang said.

The critical mineral designation for coal, if it makes it through the Department of Energy’s process, may not change much initially, Wang explained. It could lead to some “beneficial outcomes in terms of agency prioritization,” he said. But much critical minerals policy is still being worked out, and there are few programs that specifically and programmatically target the critical minerals included on lists maintained by either the Department of Energy or the United States Geological Service.

“A lot of the politicking over critical minerals designation is about the expectation of future outcomes that would arise from broad bipartisan interest in critical minerals as a category,” Wang said.

And unlike with other critical minerals, the U.S. is essentially self-sufficient for coal’s industrial and energy uses. We’re not talking about graphite here, let alone praseodymium.

At least so far, the coal industry has not thrilled to having a more friendly figure in the White House, although the share prices of some coal companies are up in afternoon trading. Coal exports in January, the most recent month for which there is data, stood at 7.7 million short tons, compared to 8.4 million short tons a year prior. Central Appalachia coal prices stand at $78 per short ton, compared to $77.35 a year ago.

If nothing else, the announcements provided Trump with the type of photo-op he craves. He even got the opportunity to bash Hillary Clinton. “One thing I learned about the coal miners … they want to mine coal. She was gonna put them in a high-tech industry where you make little cell phones and things,” he told the audience in the White House. Of course, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Sunday touted the “army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones” that Trump’s tariffs will also help generate. But no matter what the president says or does, the coal industry may still be screwed.

Red

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Politics

The Messaging War Over Energy Costs Is Just Beginning

The new climate politics are all about affordability.

Donald Trump, a wind turbine, and money.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

During the August recess, while members of Congress were back home facing their constituents, climate and environmental groups went on the offensive, sending a blitz of ads targeting vulnerable Republicans in their districts. The message was specific, straightforward, and had nothing to do with the warming planet.

“Check your electric bill lately? Rep. Mark Amodei just voted for it to go up,” declared a billboard in Reno, Nevada, sponsored by the advocacy group Climate Power.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Climate

AM Briefing: EPA Muddies The Waters

On fusion’s big fundraise, nuclear fears, and geothermal’s generations uniting

EPA Prepares to Gut Wetland Protections
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: New Orleans is expecting light rain with temperatures climbing near 90 degrees Fahrenheit as the city marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina • Torrential rains could dump anywhere from 8 to 12 inches on the Mississippi Valley and the Ozarks • Japan is sweltering in temperatures as high as 104 degrees.

THE TOP FIVE

1. EPA plans to gut the Clean Water Act

The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to propose a new Clean Water Act rule that would eliminate federal protections for many U.S. waterways, according to an internal presentation leaked to E&E News. If finalized, the rule would establish a two-part test to determine whether a wetland received federal regulations: It would need to contain surface water throughout the “wet season,” and it would need to be touching a river, stream, or other body of water that flows throughout the wet season. The new language would require fewer wetland permits, a slide from the presentation showed, according to reporter Miranda Willson. Two EPA staffers briefed on the proposal confirmed the report.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Spotlight

Birds Could Be the Anti-Wind Trump Card

How the Migratory Bird Treaty Act could become the administration’s ultimate weapon against wind farms.

A golden eagle and wind turbines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Trump administration has quietly opened the door to strictly enforcing a migratory bird protection law in a way that could cast a legal cloud over wind farms across the country.

As I’ve chronicled for Heatmap, the Interior Department over the past month expanded its ongoing investigation of the wind industry’s wildlife impacts to go after turbines for killing imperiled bald and golden eagles, sending voluminous records requests to developers. We’ve discussed here how avian conservation activists and even some former government wildlife staff are reporting spikes in golden eagle mortality in areas with operating wind projects. Whether these eagle deaths were allowable under the law – the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act – is going to wind up being a question for regulators and courts if Interior progresses further against specific facilities. Irrespective of what one thinks about the merits of wind energy, it’s extremely likely that a federal government already hostile to wind power will use the law to apply even more pressure on developers.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow