Trump has yet to rescue coal industry, data show
Miners’ optimism at odds with lower consumption, prices
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump was in a celebratory mood early last spring as he prepared to sign an executive order rolling back environmental protections reviled by the nation’s coal industry.
Turning to the miners beside him at the ceremony, Trump repeated a promise that he made often during his campaign for president. “You’re going back to work,” he said to nods of approval and applause.
But not much has changed for the nation’s ailing coal industry since Trump moved into the White House. Coal employment and production are up just slightly, coal consumption is down, and coal prices have fallen a little below where they were the day Trump took office.
“I don’t think Trump has had any effect on coal so far,” said Noah Kaufman, a research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
The data may not show it, but coal leaders are adamant that Trump already has had a positive impact on their industry. For the first time in years, they say, miners are daring to feel optimistic about coal’s prospects.
“What we’re hearing from our leadership, as well as the rank and file, is we’ve got a future,” said Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association. “We’re back in business.”
No one is naive enough to think that coal will return anytime soon to its glory days, Popovich said.
But after eight years of President Barack Obama and environmental policies the industry considered hostile, coal leaders believe Trump is putting them back on a level playing field with natural gas and other cleaner forms of energy.
“What has happened, I think, is it has given the industry and investors the assurance that at least their government is not going to discourage production, and we only have to deal with the marketplace,” Popovich said.
Other changes have come slowly.
Coal employment has barely budged under Trump.
Roughly 2,000 new coal jobs were created during Trump’s first eight months in office, but those numbers started to level off last October. By the end of 2017, the total number of jobs gained over the previous year was just 900, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Preliminary figures for 2018 show a slight uptick, with a net gain of 1,300 coal mining jobs during Trump’s presidency.
Coal production has risen slightly, about 6 percent last year, from 728 million tons in 2016 to 774 million tons in 2017, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But analysts attribute the increase in part to the bankruptcy-caused restructuring of several major coal producers, which resulted in lower production costs.
Coal consumption last year fell to 717 million tons, slightly lower than the previous year. Even more alarming for the industry: Almost all domestic coal consumption is in the power sector, yet despite an increase in natural gas prices in 2017, coal’s share of power generation for the year was just 30 percent, the lowest on record and lower than natural gas for the second year in a row.
In promising to end the “war on coal,” Trump might not have had a firm understanding of the extent of the industry’s problems, said Rob Rappold, mayor of Beckley, West Virginia.
“I think the president’s intentions were good and are good,” said Rappold, a Democrat. “I think perhaps his realization of the state of the coal industry, for a whole lot of reasons, is maybe a little off-target.”
One bright spot last year was coal exports, which are expected to total 97 million tons in 2017, a 61 percent increase over the year before.
But analysts say the boost in exports is attributable to international market factors beyond the Trump administration’s influence and likely to be shortlived. The demand for U.S. coal increased last year in China, Japan and India when a tropical cyclone disrupted their supply from Australia. Coal exports are expected to decrease in both 2018 and 2019, the Energy Information Administration projects.