Trump has vowed to make coal king again. How’s it going?By Hannah Northey | 09/26/2025 01:33 PM EDT
Energy analysts say upticks in coal production and demand are only temporary fluctuations, despite the administration barreling ahead with efforts to boost production and market share.
President Donald Trump signs an executive order to boost the coal industry at the White House on April 8. Andrew Thomas/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
President Donald Trump is scoring political points on the right with his aggressive push to revive the struggling U.S. coal industry.
“It’s not just ‘drill baby drill,’ it’s also ‘diiig baby diiiig,’” Dagen McDowell, the host of Fox Business, said on “The Bottom Line” last month. “The president [is] bringing coal back.”
Is he, really?
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Trump has made rescuing coal a top priority in his second term, something he promised and failed to do during his first term. The administration is approving mining leases, fast-tracking permits for mines and forcing some coal-fired power plants to remain open while exempting others from EPA rules. But since the Obama administration’s big crackdown, more than 300 power plants — the primary destination for U.S. coal — have stopped burning coal while coal production has fallen by half since 2006.
Trump officials are pushing to reverse course; opening massive tracts of public land to coal mining, largely in the West; and quickly approving projects that could yield more than 800 million additional tons of federal coal for power plants and export markets in states like Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota and Utah.
The administration also plans to lift a Biden-era ban on coal leasing in the Powder River Basin, a region of rolling grasslands in southeastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming that pumps out 40 percent of the nation’s coal but has seen production crater since the 1990s. It’s the United States’ main source of thermal coal to fuel power plants.
At the same time, DOE is trying to scrub coal’s dirty image; and offering up $200 billion in loans for infrastructure, including coal-powered electricity generation. EPA also joined the fray, exempting a host of aging coal plants from federal environmental air and water regulations while clawing back climate regulations.
“President Trump has expedited the expansion of beautiful, clean coal – a critical energy source that Joe Biden tried to eradicate under his radical climate agenda,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “President Trump has unleashed coal because its capabilities allow us to supply more energy, lower electricity prices, and stabilize the grid while creating thousands of high paying jobs.”
Pro-Trump coal boosters say an upswing has begun.
Production of thermal coal used for power generation and metallurgical coal for steelmaking is forecast to rise this year compared to the prior year. At the same time, demand for coal to burn for electricity is also up, and coal-fired power plants are expected to generate 9 percent more power for all of 2025 compared with last year, the first year-over-year increase in coal generation since 2021, according to federal data. They also point to eye-popping projections for electricity demand with the proliferation of data centers, and the growing string of decisions in states like Arizona, Kentucky and New Mexico to delay the retirement of coal plants that need fuel from the Powder River Basin.
“Obviously, the demand is not where it was in the early 2000s but there is still demand,” said Travis Deti, executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association, whose members include mining giants Peabody, Core Natural Resources and Navajo Transitional Energy. “We might not have enough coal [leases] to meet the demand going forward,” said Deti.
Michelle Bloodworth, the president of America’s Power, a trade group representing coal interests, said her members want to preserve every megawatt of existing coal-fired generation and argued those plants are needed for grid stability and make economic sense, especially when the grid is strained. Some power plant owners, she said, are talking about building new facilities and making investments given the forecasts for power demand and support from the Trump administration. The governor of coal-heavy West Virginia this week also called for the construction of new coal plants.
“There’s a lot of units that are not running, certainly at capacity,” she said. “There’s a lot you can do to make a coal plant, an existing coal plant, almost a new cutting-edge technology. You just have to invest in it.”
But experts say the temporary upticks in coal production and demand aren’t proof of a bigger trend, and instead temporary fluctuations driven by the price of gas and weather.
Andy Blumenfeld, a coal analyst at McCloskey by OPIS, said almost 8,000 megawatts of coal-fired generation are scheduled to either close or shift to natural gas by the end of the year. That number includes a 1,500-MW plant in Michigan that the DOE has ordered to continue operating.
That downward power trend is extending into mining and leasing on federal land, where active coal leases in the U.S. have steadily declined from almost 500 in the 1990s to about 280 two years ago, according to federal data. Blumenfeld also said coal miners in the Powder River Basin have already locked up 16 years’ worth of leasing and the administration isn’t likely to drive a surge of new activity.
Brendan Pierpont, director of electricity modeling at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan energy and climate policy think tank, agreed. He said coal is in a long-term structural decline that’s unlikely to ease even with Trump’s intervention or the rush to build new power-hungry data centers.
That’s because the country’s existing coal fleet is aging — the average age hovering around 42 years — as maintenance and fuel costs rise, he said. There are no plans for new facilities on the horizon, Pierpont said, and utilities and data center developers looking for the cheapest and fastest sources to power demand are moving toward storage and gas peaking units, not coal.
“I don’t see anything that’s going to kind of stop this long-term trend, because it’s really driven by these fundamental economic factors,” said Pierpont. “These are older, less economic clunkers, essentially, and … it’s pretty clear that economics there are going to be a limiting factor.”
America’s mining hubTrump’s push to expand coal mining on public land could have the biggest impact in the Powder River Basin, which covers 20,000 square miles — almost the size of West Virginia.
Trump officials in July announced they’re considering lifting a ban the Biden administration imposed on leasing in the Powder River Basin to determine whether the policy aligns with the president’s declaration of an energy emergency and executive orders that call for unleashing fossil fuels. The Biden administration argued that barring activity in the mining hotbed would safeguard the nation from an uptick in greenhouse gas emissions and cited waning demand for coal.
At the time, Todd Yeager, the field manager for the Bureau of Land management’s Buffalo office in Wyoming, said the agency was cutting off access to 48 billion short tons of coal in the basin, and asserted that production in the Cowboy State had declined since peaking in 2008 and that federal data showed it would continue to dwindle.
The last coal-fired power plant built in the continental U.S. came online in 2013, BLM said at the time. More are poised to retire, and Wyoming Powder River Basin coal was shipped to 10 fewer power plants in 2023 than in 2021. The agency also blamed a lack of demand and noted that two coal leases the BLM oversees in Wyoming had been paused for years due to “lack of miner operator interest.”
Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, said that many of the active coal leases have long been on the books and there’s no proof companies are still interested in mining federal coal, given the costs.
“These approvals were just sitting out there, and it’s easy to score political points … but it opens the question of, ‘OK, now what happens? Is it all political theatrics or is there legitimate interest here?’” Nichols asked.
Deti with the Wyoming Mining Association blamed the Obama and Biden administrations for blocking leasing and shelving projects in the basin over climate concerns. “When we pushed back against the moratorium, the response was ‘the demand’s not there,’” said Deti. “Well, if the demand isn’t there, why do you need a moratorium?”
Republican governors in Wyoming and Montana sued the BLM to overturn the ban. Now they’re urging the Trump administration to take action. Montana’s delegation has also succeeded in moving legislative language to undo the prohibition through the House and into the Senate, where it’s awaiting action.
Blumenfeld said the Trump administration is advancing leases in states like Utah and North Dakota that had been tripped up with litigation tied to inadequate consideration of climate change. Empowered by recent Supreme Court decisions that limit those reviews, Blumenfeld said federal workers under Trump are now quickly working through the backlog.
Yet even if the Trump administration fast-tracks projects and lifts the leasing ban, Blumenfeld said a leasing bonanza is unlikely and that producers have more than a decade’s worth of coal locked up — an amount that could last longer as more coal plants shutter.
Obtaining a lease also requires both an upfront reserve payment or a “bonus bid,” as well as royalties for each ton of coal produced and reclamation bonding requirements, Blumenfeld said. Those costs pose hurdles for coal companies, even though the GOP megabill reduced royalties from 12.5 percent to 7 percent, he said.
“Some mining companies may be facing a more immediate need to obtain new reserves. Given it has taken up to 10 years to obtain a lease in the past, some companies might be interested in leasing new reserves because of the reopening window at the BLM,” said Blumenfeld.
“I do not think there will be a rush to lease new reserves,” he said.
‘Put miners back to work’When Trump hatched his plan to revive coal in April, he also vowed to bring back the nation’s struggling fleet of coal plants.
“We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” said Trump at a signing ceremony in April, flanked by coal miners donning hard hats and Republicans from a slew of Western states.
At the event, he inked four executive orders to open new leasing for mining coal on federal land, to loosen emission standards for coal plants, and to direct the Justice Department to take legal action against state laws and regulations that impede energy development. The directives also laid the path for DOE to take executive action to keep coal plants online.
“All those plants that have been closed are going to be opened if they’re modern enough or they’ll be ripped down and brand new ones will be built,” said Trump. “We’re going to put the miners back to work.”
Also at the event was Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation, who later praised the Trump administration for boosting Western coal mining. NTEC, the tribe’s wholly owned energy company and one of the largest coal producers in the U.S., is now moving forward with recently approved mining leases in Wyoming and Montana.
Conor Bernstein, a spokesperson for the National Mining Association, said coal’s fate has shifted quickly as onerous Biden-era regulations are pulled back and mining is boosted, providing more coal for producers and utilities.
Coal-fired generation buoyed by pressure from gas has now exceeded year-earlier levels each month during the first half of this year, said Bernstein. He also pointed to demand from artificial intelligence data centers growing, adding that grid operators are short on power and utilities are postponing and canceling coal plant retirements because they need dispatchable capacity.
“Global coal demand is also continuing to set records and U.S. energy exports are a central piece of the administration’s trade negotiations,” said Bernstein. “The stage is set for coal to play a deeply important — if unexpected — role in the U.S. electricity mix in the years ahead and meet a growing share of global coal demand.”
But Blumenfeld said the outlook is nuanced and the market continues to be strained. He noted that coal’s recent uptick was largely due to weather and coal competing with natural gas, which sank to less than $2 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) last year before climbing back up to around $3 per MMBtu today. That, in turn, increased demand for coal out of the Powder River Basin, he said.
Those gains could quickly dissipate if more coal plants come offline, he said. And coal still needs to compete with cheap natural gas after nuclear, hydropower and renewables, and it must do so in markets that continue to decline, said Blumenfeld.
Pierpont added that while growing power demand tied to manufacturing and AI could temporarily keep terminal coal plants online, coal still remains economically uncompetitive.
The cost of producing power from coal rose by 28 percent from 2021 through 2024, according to a report that Energy Innovation released earlier this year. That uptick, the think tank said, was largely due to the rising cost of fuel for the plants, increased operations and maintenance costs, capital costs tied to maintaining aging plants that were not run and full capacity, and inflation.
“A lot of this data center demand growth is really fairly near term,” said Pierpont. “If you look at the pipeline of projects that’s going to be ready to deliver in the next three years, four years, it’s by and large dominated by solar, energy storage, some wind and some natural gas.
“Most utilities … are really focused on … the most cost-effective resources to meet this growing demand,” he added. “By and large, coal is not a part of that.”
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