Here’s the thing about coal: you can’t eat it. Or wear it. Other than a small market for “things really awful parents shove into the stockings of children,” coal gets burned. In the United States, almost all of it gets burned to make electricity. Which makes all the talk about Trump bringing back coal jobs worse than ridiculous.
In May, President-elect Donald Trump stood on the stage at the Charleston Civic Center in West Virginia, put on a miners helmet and pretended to shovel coal.
“If I win we’re going to bring those miners back,” Trump said at the rally. “…These ridiculous rules and regulations that make it impossible for you to compete … we’re going to take that all off the table, folks.”
With Trump’s election and Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, many in Kentucky are now waiting to cash in on the Republican promise of more coal jobs.
Yeah, boy. Trump digs coal. So we take away the Clean Water Act and allow mines to dump unlimited waste, and take away the Clean Air Act and allow power plants to spread unlimited ash and acid rain, and do in MSHA inspections so that miners lives are even more at risk. And what does that bring?
U.S. Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, though, wasn’t making any promises Friday.
Nothing. That’s what it brings.
About 33 percent of all the electric power in the United States comes from burning coal. Which sounds like a lot, and it is. But here’s the thing—less than a decade ago, it was 50 percent. What happened in the interval wasn’t Obama starting up a war on coal. It was fracking for natural gas.
And coal jobs? They are well and truly fracked. Forever.
In that decade, fracking made natural gas cheap and abundant. It also made earthquakes common in some of the most previously stable regions of the nation, polluted aquifers, and had a marginal effect on climate change … but put that aside.
In the summer of 2008, natural gas cost over $12 per million Btu. That was about three times as much as the equivalent energy from coal. At the time coal was 50 percent of the nation’s electrical production. Natural gas, about 20 percent.
Gas has many advantages over coal. In particular, a gas-powered power plant can be built much more cheaply, at a smaller scale, and added to incrementally. Coal also has to be stockpiled on site, and the ash it produces has to be stored after it’s burned. Coal is simply a mess to deal with.
Plus, to be cost effective, a coal plant needs to be massive, and to operate for decades. The investment is in the billions. A gas plant can start off a thousand times smaller, grow slowly over time, and can potentially recoup its investment much more quickly. The investment is in the millions.
So why coal plants in the first place? Because for years the gas market surged up and down. Prices would become competitive with coal for a period of weeks or months, then the tight relationship between supply and demand would cause gas contracts to double in cost, or quadruple, overnight. That volatility was enough so that power companies would often build coal plants as their “base” and add gas plants for “peaking.” That is, you might put in enough coal plants to supply 100 percent of your normal base load, then add gas plants for those occasions when demand “spiked.” As power needs in an area grew, you could meet them by adding more incremental capacity at your gas plant, all the while planning to build a new coal plant and increase the base capacity.
But by the end of 2008, the cost was of natural gas wasn’t $12. It was $6. By 2009, gas cost just over half what it did in 2008. It kept moving down because fracking was putting supply well ahead of demand. Meanwhile the cost of coal was actually creeping upward.
There were hundreds of new coal plants in planning across the country in 2008. By 2010, there were dozens. By 2012, there were none. Even plants that had broken ground were abandoned in progress.
As fracking made the price of gas go down and stay down, the other advantages of natural gas became too tempting. Power companies not only used gas for new capacity, they began retrofitting coal plants to burn gas. Coal-powered generation fell 11 percent in 2009 alone. It kept falling.
No one had predicted the nation’s energy production could change so quickly. In fact, they’d predicted the exact opposite—especially when talking about the possibility of replacing fossil fuels with renewables. Wind and solar made up just 3 percent of the energy portfolio in 2008. By the time coal and natural gas were tied for production at the end of 2015, renewables were up to 7 percent of the picture.
The United States is now in a cycle that looks like this: gas gradually replaces coal where it can. Meanwhile, renewables—which are rapidly decreasing in price and increasing in efficiency—slowly eats up the difference.
The result is simply that there is no market for coal. Even making coal cheaper won’t bring that market back, because to buy more coal, power plants would have to build more coal capacity. And they are not going to go there, especially when they can add renewables at a reasonable cost.
Everything Trump said about coal during the election, every sign waving at the convention, was simply a straight up con for the votes of people in coal areas.
“We’re certainly encouraged with the Trump victory,” [West Virginia Coal Association President Bill Raney] said. “We think that gives us a little spark of hope.”
So much hope, in fact, that Raney predicted West Virginia might soon see its annual coal production rise back above 120 million tons, a figure it hasn’t reached since 2012 and an amount that’s nearly double what recent studies project as likely in future years, even without the emissions rule President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to reverse.
Industry and energy experts doubt Raney’s predictions will ever come true, and remain skeptical that any combination of regulatory rollbacks or other policy shifts from a Trump administration can provide anything that would be considered a significant rebound in Southern West Virginia coal production or regional mining jobs.
By reducing safety and environmental laws, the Republicans can make it easier on coal producers, driving up profit margins for coal. However, that will likely mean more cheap surface mining, including mountaintop removal, and less underground mining. That actually means less jobs.
Like Trump’s tax scheme, what Trump will do for coal will go to a tiny handful of coal mine owners. The 50,000 or so coal miners remaining in the United States won’t see new members joining their ranks. They’ll see coal continue to shrink, eaten up by gas at one end and renewables at the other.
But Trump still digs their votes.