The people who actually do dig coal are going to be digging less of it as another coal mine closes.
It was announced this past week that a coal mine - the 4 West Mine - in southwestern Pennsylvania will close. It's another blow to the coal industry, which President Trump has promised to revive. Mepco, the company that owns 4 West, said it would be shutting down the Greene County mine because it had become less productive and more costly to operate. About 400 workers will lose their jobs.
Trump made multiple tweets at the start of 2017 bragging about a Pennsylvania mine that ended up employing around 70 people. He even made it the highlight of a rally last summer. But so far Trump has been shockingly silent about the closure of a much larger mine just up the road.
Last June, Scott Pruitt claimed that Trump’s support caused an explosion in coal jobs.
"In fact, since the the fourth quarter of last year until most recently, we've added almost 50,000 jobs in the coal sector. In the month of May alone, almost 7,000 jobs."
Except Pruitt was lying. It wasn’t 50,000 jobs. It wasn’t 5,000 jobs. At peak, the number of coal jobs, including temporary positions, was up around 1,300—38 times less than Pruitt stated. And that was a seasonal bump that’s been fading ever since. Before the closing of the 4 West Mine, the increase since Donald Trump took the helm was … about 500 jobs. With the closing of 4 West, all but 100 of those jobs have been eliminated. The closure in Pennsylvania followed another mine closure in Kentucky.
The mine closure follows the unanimous rejection of the plan created by Trump and Rick Perry to artificially boost the price of coal—even though the majority of commissioners were appointed by Trump. It also follows continued coal-powered power plant closures.
This time, even the New York Times is going to have to work hard to find someone who thinks Trump is the savior of coal.
Even those 70 jobs that made Trump so excited a year ago were at a mine producing a special kind of coal—metallurgical coal used in the making of steel. In the United States, metallurgical coal occurs only in a few regions. The large coal fields in the Midwest and the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana hold only steam coal, used in power plants.
There is not a single coal power plant in the works. Not a single one permitted for construction. Not a single one in the planning stage.
In fact, even with the Trump/Perry plan to force utilities into using coal, aging coal-fired plants continued to close. Now that the effort to enforce “reliability” by defining reliability as “anything as long as it’s coal or nuclear” has failed, expect that process to speed up.
Donald Trump has written executive orders allowing coal companies to fill streams and rivers with untreated mine waste. That didn’t stop the closures. He’s pulled out the Paris agreement and ended the Clean Power Plan. That didn’t help. He left the position of mine safety chief open for the better part of a year, and Republicans at the state level pitched in by reducing or eliminating state mine inspections while the federal program was in disarray. That did help—resulting in double the number of dead miners.
And while Trump has made ridiculous statements about “clean, clean coal,” the only plant that was supposed to actually demonstrate “clean coal” was such a costly failure that it will never burn coal at all.
In 2017, with Trump in charge, and every trace of regulations that could be blamed on President Obama dispatched, literally dozens of coal power plants closed.
Utility coal power closures driven by market economics were a regular occurrence throughout 2017. While President Donald Trump’s “Energy Dominance” agenda gave the false impression that federal efforts could revive coal, 27 coal-fired plants totaling 22 gigawatts (GW) of capacity were announced for early closure or conversion in 2017 – roughly one every 15 days since Trump’s election.
And there’s a very simple reason. Coal costs too much. It’s not just more costly than natural gas, it’s more costly than wind or solar.
Building new coal is more expensive than building new renewable energy across the U.S. , and in many parts of the country, keeping existing coal plants open is more expensive than building new wind turbines (and solar, in some places). From 2007 to 2016, 531 coal units representing 55.6 GW of capacity were retired across the U.S., at an increasingly rapid pace.
That pace can be expected to increase again in 2018.
The story Trump told miners was a fairy tale. Coal will continue to decline, and while metallurgical coal will continue to be produced along with a steadily falling amount of steam coal, the heyday of coal is simply gone. It won’t come back, because it can’t come back. Coal is simply useless without a plant in which to burn it, and those plants are going away.
Obama’s “war on coal” was a myth. The idea that “Trump digs coal” was an even bigger myth.
But off the 400 miners being laid off, the New York Times is sure to find at least one who says he still supports Trump. Count on it.