Donald Trump again ignores the real reason US coal is on the decline
Tom DiChristopher | @tdichristopher
Monday, 10 Oct 2016 | 10:45 AM ET
CNBC.com
( Trump isn't bringing back coal mining jobs. Just another lie. )
Donald Trump on Sunday reiterated his claim that he will revive American coal companies, but in so doing he has again failed to acknowledge that the U.S. natural gas boom he celebrates is the primary reason coal use is declining in the United States.
" Hillary Clinton wants to put all the miners out of business. There is a thing called clean coal. Coal will last for 1,000 years in this country," Trump said during the debate. "Now we have natural gas and so many other things because of technology. We have unbelievable — we have found over the last seven years, we have found tremendous wealth right under our feet."
Clean coal technology remains a subject of debate. But as the technology and policies necessary to bring it to market progress, natural gas is poised to unseat coal as the top source for electricity generation this year as the gap in prices between the two energy sources continues to narrow, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected in March.
Coal and natural gas now generate about the same share of U.S. electricity, following consistent gains in market share for natural gas that began before 1990.
"The recent decline in the generation share of coal, and the concurrent rise in the share of natural gas, was mainly a market-driven response to lower natural gas prices that have made natural gas generation more economically attractive," the EIA wrote.
That is a view widely held by energy economists, but one Trump did not mention on Sunday and has not acknowledged in other major speeches on his energy policy.
The Republican presidential candidate has repeatedly claimed that he will boost economic output, create millions of new jobs and put coal miners back to work. But the windfalls Trump touts fail to take into account the real reason the coal industry is struggling, and originate from an industry-linked report whose findings rely on a forecasting model that often overstates the economic benefits of drilling, according to economists who study U.S. shale oil and gas.
The Trump campaign was not immediately available for comment on Monday, and it did not respond to separate requests for comment when CNBC published the economists' opinions in the past.
Immigration and trade have dominated much of the policy conversation this campaign season, but the next president will take office at a crucial time for the energy industry. America's revolution in high-tech oil production has been sidetracked by — and has contributed to — a two-year crude price rout that has bankrupted dozens of domestic energy companies.
Trump said in August that lifting restrictions on oil and gas would increase GDP by more than $127 billion, add about 500,000 jobs and boost wages by $30 billion each year over the next seven years.
Those figures come from the Institute for Energy Research, a nonprofit that advocates for a free market approach to energy. It typically casts fossil fuels as the most economic form of energy generation, promotes research that says green energy jobs are unsustainable and claims there is an "enormous volume of sensationalized, simplistic and often plain wrong information" on climate change.
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