The U.S. coal industry is dying. Trump threw it a lifeline.

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has moved quickly to boost the coal industry as part of his strategy for “energy dominance.”

This month alone, the Environmental Protection Agency said it would overhaul coal plant regulations limiting carbon emissions, mercury output, wastewater runoff and coal ash dumps. The Interior Department approved extending the life of Montana’s Spring Creek Mine by 16 years, allowing the Navajo Transitional Energy Company to produce an additional 40 million tons of coal on federal land. And backers of a proposed plant in Wyoming to convert coal into ammonia have cited the new administration’s policies as one reason they’re optimistic their project will be built

Once considered on its way out, coal is increasingly seen as a necessary part of the energy mix, with the tech sector demanding ever more energy for data centers to power AI and grid operators seeking backup power in the event of extreme weather. While new coal power plants are unlikely to be built, utilities have begun to delay planned retirements — and some could crank up their current operations.

Industry boosters like the National Mining Association and America’s Power say coal plants now operating at 40 percent capacity could push their production up to 70 or even 90 percent. The climate costs of such a boost could be enormous, but coal skeptics suggest the revival is mostly hype, as the United States builds renewables at a record pace that are far cheaper to run than aging coal plants.

“This demand for energy is giving coal an extended life,” said Ernie Thrasher, CEO of Xcoal, a coal supply and logistics company. “Now I don’t know if it’s to 2040, 2045, 2050. But I definitely don’t think you’ll see significant downsizing of the coal business in the next five years. If nothing else, you may see growth not in new power plants, but just existing facilities consuming more coal.”

Although Trump made coal central to his first campaign, a coal revival never materialized during his first term. The fracking boom flooded the market with cheap gas and made the United States the world’s largest natural gas producer. Coal power, which is more expensive, was increasingly phased out, and construction of new coal power plants slowed to a halt.

Today, coal consumption for electricity is about a third of what it was 20 years ago, with only about 16 percent of electricity now generated by coal.

Trump was less vocal about coal in his second campaign, but this time the market might meet his pro-coal policies halfway. His weakening of pollution rules for coal plants piggybacks on an existing trend. There are roughly 200 coal plants operating in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, with 175 generating significant electricity. But in the past three years, at least 40 coal-fired power plants delayed their closures, according to data compiled by the National Mining Association.

That’s in part because energy demand is on the rise for the first time in roughly two decades. At the country’s largest gathering of energy companies in Houston this month, executives universally predicted that data center and AI growth would lead to insatiable electricity demand.

Global electricity consumption in 2024 rose by nearly double the annual average for the past 10 years, thanks to increased air-conditioning use, electric vehicles and tech demand, according to the International Energy Agency. Coal demand rose 1 percent last year, largely because record global temperatures drove places such as China and India to use more cooling.

Energy company NextEra, owner of the utility Florida Power & Light, predicts a 55 percent increase in U.S. power demand in the next 20 years, compared with 9 percent in the previous two decades, CEO John Ketchum said.

Although NextEra uses very little coal power, and Ketchum sees increases in coal usage as inefficient, the company foresees the total U.S. market squeezing another 35 gigawatts of power from existing coal plants by 2030 to meet a 460-gigawatt increase in energy demand.

“The issue that we always face with coal is that it’s extremely labor-intensive, which drives up the cost,” he said.

Coal facilities require hundreds of workers, while a gas plant can operate with a few dozen staffers. But one obstacle to the immediate replacement of coal by natural gas is the four-year backlog on orders for gas turbines from companies like Siemens Energy.

Climate costs

Trump’s deregulatory push could allow coal plants to meet demand that otherwise would be held back by environmental rules.

Rhodium Group estimates that under President Joe Biden’s policies, only 5 to 10 percent of coal power plants would remain open after 2035. Trump’s rollback of EPA rules could allow up to 42 percent of coal plants to stay open, according to Ben King, associate director of Rhodium’s energy and climate practice.

With the 2020 California heat wave that left 800,000 homes and businesses without power, and disruptive winter storms, the power sector has grown concerned that further coal retirements might lead to reliability problems, said Jim Robb, head of the nonpartisan North American Electric Reliability Corporation. If one source of power — such as gas, solar or wind — gets knocked out by extreme weather or can’t handle demand surges, utilities could fall back on using coal plants, he said.

“Coal is going to be around for longer than people thought. Because coal is a key component of keeping our lights on and our heat pumps running,” said Mark Christie, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

“We’re going to need all these resources,” he added. “We’re going to need uprated nuclear, we’re going to need more combined-cycle gas, and we’re going to need to keep the existing coal plants running.”

In some cases, power authorities are intervening to guarantee grid reliability. Talen Energy, for example, wanted to retire the Brandon Shores and H.A. Wagner coal plants that serve Baltimore and the surrounding area by 2025. But grid operator PJM Interconnection has insisted they continue operating, reaching an agreement to delay their retirements until 2029, when transmission lines can bring more electricity to the region.

Rachel Gleason, executive director of Pennsylvania Coal Alliance, an industry group, said Trump’s EPA rollbacks also could lead to the reconsideration of planned 2028 retirements of the state’s Keystone and Conemaugh coal plants — and could help keep plants operating in coal-friendly West Virginia.

But extending the life of coal plants comes with climate costs. Burning fossil fuels drives up global temperatures, which increases demand for air conditioning, spurring energy use and associated emissions.

Trump’s EPA rollbacks, which are expected to require a year-long review process, would increase carbon dioxide emissions by up to 333 million metric tons annually by 2035, with coal accounting for 70 to 80 percent of the additional emissions, according to a Rhodium Group estimate. That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of 78 million gasoline-powered cars.

“It was not a surprise that they were going to try to roll back many of these regulations, which were designed not only to protect our climate but also to protect public health from all of these pollutants that these plants produce,” said Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group.

Trump has long touted “clean coal” and recently posted on his Truth Social platform that he was “authorizing my Administration to immediately begin producing Energy with BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL.” But the reality is that few companies are considering using the carbon capture technology required for “clean” coal. Installing carbon capture technology at an average-sized coal plant would cost around $2 billion, said Michelle Bloodworth, head of the coal advocacy group America’s Power.

Glenrock Energy is proposing a facility in Wyoming that would convert coal into ammonia for fertilizer, to burn with coal in power plants to reduce emissions, or for hydrogen conversion. That “clean coal” facility has been under development since 2021 and would sequester its carbon emissions underground or use them for advanced oil recovery, Glenrock CEO Terrence Manning said.

But permitting, lining up financial backers and building the project could take four to five years, he added.

“We have heard a call from President Trump to build new coal,” said Karl Moor, CEO of Powerscape Global, which is providing key technology for the project. “You asked for clean, big, new coal. We’re going to build it for you, and we’re going to build it as fast as possible.”

Wishful thinking

Coal has its skeptics, who say they have seen this movie before, a promised revival that never materialized.

Whenever possible, coal will be phased out for far less expensive gas, solar and wind power, said Seth Feaster, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Even as utilities gear up for a surge in demand for data centers and AI, it’s not clear how much of the expected demand will really materialize. Renewables so far have easily met rising electricity needs and can be deployed quickly, while gas plants can take five years, and developing a nuclear plant requires up to a decade.

Feaster calls the coal industry’s logic “wishful thinking.”

“You may delay to some extent the disappearance of coal, but it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when,” Feaster said.

American coal’s long-term future depends on heavy industry at home and overseas demand, said Gleason of Pennsylvania Coal Alliance. There are more than 600 gigawatts of coal plants being developed globally, with China accounting for about two-thirds of that growth, according to Global Energy Monitor’s coal tracking project.

The Trump administration is pushing coal in the developing world, with Energy Secretary Chris Wright saying at the Powering Africa Summit in Washington this month that coal was the solution to the growing energy needs in Africa and Asia.

“Probably a lot of future electricity in Africa is going to come from coal and should come from coal, because the resources are there,” Wright said.

That week, the U.S. pulled out of the Just Energy Transition Partnership, a program designed to funnel billions of dollars to places like South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam to help them transition from coal to clean energy.

But even if the U.S. can increase exports, no one in the American coal industry has any illusions that the sector will ever have the economic footprint it once had, with hundreds of thousands of jobs.

“What they could achieve is at most a temporary lifeline for coal, not a revival of the industry,” said Shannon Fisk, director of state electric sector advocacy at Earthjustice, an environmental law firm.

“In an economically competitive market, coal is going to lose,” Fisk added. “The question is how much can the administration kind of manipulate that market to boost coal production.”

Cover photo:  The U.S. coal industry is dying. Trump threw it a lifeline.