From the way Donald Trump keeps talking about coal, you would think he’s spent years underground with a pickax. But Trump’s connection to coal is simply that talking about it works for him. It provides a faux, working-man connection through an industry that most people associate with images they’ve only seen in films and the idea of industrial decline.
At Monday’s televised cabinet meeting, Trump against referenced “big stories” about a new mine opening. He also included this mine in his morning tweets. Not surprisingly, the tweet connects to a story on Fox News. What does that story say about the new mine?
Dethlefsen told Leland Vittert that for the 70 positions available in the mine, 400 people applied.
Seventy jobs. That’s the news Trump is crowing about. It’s the first new mine of the “Trump era” according to the Fox story. However, is not the first news about mine jobs in the Trump era.
In April, US coal production was up 17% compared to a year ago. At the same time, however, coal mining jobs were down 8% (about 6,000 jobs).
This year alone eight coal power plants have announced closures. Many are shutting decades before their expiry date. The closures total 9.4 GW of lost electricity generating capacity, which is more than what all of Qatar can produce today.
Donald Trump continues to misrepresent the coal industry, misrepresent why it’s in decline, and simply lie about the effect of his actions on what’s happening at the mines.
The new mines that are scheduled to open, including in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, are ones that will produce metallurgical coal, which is used to make steel. This coal is used to produce coke, which is then used to blast the furnace to create metal. It’s different from thermal coal, which is burned for steam to produce heat and electricity.
For both kinds of coal, there are limited markets. In the case of coal used to general electricity, that market is steadily shrinking as natural gas and renewable sources replace coal in the marketplace. Coal is being forced out for a simple reason: Cost. It’s not just the cost of coal, it’s the cost of handling coal at the plant, the cost of dealing with coal ash, and the cost of removing ash from emissions. It’s the sheer size of equipment needed to make coal plants practical.
Natural gas, wind, and solar can be added more quickly, more easily scaled to fit needs, expanded more readily, and positioned more flexibly. Coal is simply losing out because it has massive disadvantages.
For a long time, coal was the primary source of power because there was simply no choice. Natural gas fluctuated wildly in both cost and availability. That unreliability limited gas to use in “peaking” plants that could supplement coal or nuclear. Wind and solar were simply too expensive or too experimental to serve as a significant source.
None of that remains true. LIke it or not—and there are a lot of reasons not to like it—fracking has made natural gas cheap and abundant. It will stay that way for at least a decade, if not longer. At the same time, wind and solar have become literally orders of magnitude cheaper and more available. As enormous as the national power grid may be, the pressures are there to drive coal’s percentage of the market down, down, and down. There will not be new coal jobs, simply because there is nowhere to see more coal.
The other trend in coal mining has been long term, ongoing automation. Automation in this case doesn’t mean computerized systems running mines like a robotic factory. It means bigger mechanical equipment in mines that produce tens of millions of tons of coal a year. A single mine in Wyoming produces as much coal as all of Pennsylvania, and Ohio put together. Right next to that mine is another that produces enough to cover Illinois and Indiana. With massive trucks carrying 450 tons and multiple draglines each of which stands as tall as a 15-story building, they simply move more material per person than any mine in the east could ever hope to match.
The biggest factor in killing mining jobs was simply cheaper mining with bigger equipment. That’s what killed 80 percent of all mining jobs in the country before Barack Obama became president.
The result now is that there are fewer coal mining jobs than there are yoga instructors. Fewer coal mining jobs than there are workers at Whole Foods.
The two largest U.S. coal companies are just emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and you’ll hear some good news in terms of their numbers. But it has nothing to do with Trump.
The increased demand for steel and metallurgical coal from China has raised prices worldwide. U.S. coal companies are now emerging from bankruptcy, and some of them are going public with new investors. And the United States now has a coal-friendly administration, with a president looking to push for an infrastructure deal that could increase the domestic demand for steel.
Does that mean a flood of new metallurgical coal jobs in the U.S.? Nope. It means that many large coal mines in Australia are owned by American companies. Those mines will expand production to meet the need in China. So some American corporations will see improved bottom lines, a fact that Trump is sure to note, but the actual coal mining jobs will be on the far side of the world.
Trump won’t create coal jobs. Trump can’t create coal jobs. There are no such jobs. There haven’t been for years in many areas, decades in others. Nothing Trump says about Paris will make them return.