Obscure coal CEO rains money on Trump while outflanking rivals

Coal mogul Joseph Craft was at a Department of Energy conference last month where everyone was reveling in President Donald Trump’s call to achieve “global energy dominance.”

A big-oil chief wanted more exports of America’s oil and natural gas riches. A union leader called for more investments in energy infrastructure. And Craft? More coal, of course.

“We have been the backbone of the economy” the 66-year-old chief executive officer of Alliance Resource Partners declared. “Obviously, we can’t have ‘Energy Dominance’ without coal.”

That’s Craft’s bet, anyway. But he’s got some credibility to talk up his book. He steered Alliance Resource through the teeth of the industry’s worst downturn in generations and came out largely unscathed. For 17 straight years, Alliance has turned an annual profit and in 2016, when Peabody Energy and Arch Coal were mired in bankruptcy, the nation’s sixth biggest coal miner was making more money than any of its U.S. rivals.

Little known to the general public, the camera-shy Craft is now being thrust into the spotlight. In January, he donated $1 million for Trump’s inauguration. In March, he sat front and center at the Environmental Protection Agency as the president signed an executive order and declared the “war on coal” over. And he’s well-connected: Craft’s wife, Kelly Knight Craft, a political fundraiser in her own right, has been nominated as U.S. ambassador to Canada.

In Trump, Craft sees a return to the pro-coal policies that lured him into the industry four decades ago — and reason to believe Alliance can keep growing into the 2020s.

“Some people don’t like his style,” he said of Trump at a June investor conference in Florida. “But you can’t argue with the substance.”

Craft’s bullish view on coal runs up against staggering trends going in the opposite direction. Since 2008, U.S. production of the fossil fuel has fallen 40 percent, to 728 million tons last year. In April, coal generated just 28 percent of America’s electricity, about half the share it had when George W. Bush was president. Cheap gas, wind and solar power, tougher environmental policies and flat electricity usage in the U.S. have all played a part in coal’s decline. Few experts predict a rebound.

But amid the carnage, Alliance Resource is better-positioned to thrive than most peers. Its customers — a few dozen power plants in states from Florida to Indiana, Alabama to West Virginia — are located too far from America’s prolific shalegas fields to switch energy sources, he said at the Florida conference.