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Eight years ago, just a few weeks after President Donald Trump began his first term in the White House, the Salt River Project — one of Arizona’s largest utilities — announced its plans to shutter the coal-fired Navajo Generating Station some 25 years ahead of schedule. Shortly afterward, Public Service Company of New Mexico indicated that it, too, would be closing its San Juan coal plant earlier than previously planned.
In some ways, Trump couldn’t have asked for a better occasion to rally the troops and re-enter the great “war on coal” — to swoop in and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, freeing the plant owners from regulatory burdens, saving hundreds of relatively high-wage jobs and preserving millions in tax, lease and royalty dollars for the local communities and the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe. He already had a battlefield advantage: The federal government owned 25% of the Navajo plant.
But all the president’s policies and all his Cabinet men couldn’t put King Coal back on the throne again.
The Navajo plant stopped spewing sulfur dioxide, mercury and smog over the sandstone expanse around Glen Canyon in December 2019, and San Juan burned its last ton of coal in 2022. Both facilities were eventually demolished, and Trump’s first term saw a steeper decline in U.S. electric power coal consumption than any other president before or since.
So this April, early in his second term, when Trump signed four executive orders aimed at “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry” to shore up the power grid and feed energy-greedy data centers, it felt more than a bit like déjà vu. It also demonstrated that Trump is not only a lousy economist, he can’t even remember the failures of his own first term. Once again, he is trying to “rescue” the industry from “regulatory burdens.” And once again he is likely to fail, primarily because he has never understood the reasons behind coal’s downfall.
For the signing, Trump invited a troop of burly, hardhat-wearing coal miners — all part of his fossil fuel-fetish circus — along with Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren, who lauded the executive orders as a “pivotal moment for energy policy.” Nygren’s attendance may seem unusual, considering the coal industry’s legacy of exploitation and pollution in the Southwest, especially since most of the revenue-producing coal plants and mines on the nation have already closed. But the tribally owned Navajo Transitional Energy Company (NTEC) is the nation’s third-largest coal producer, with mines in the Powder River Basin and northwest New Mexico, and it also owns a share of the Four Corners Power Plant, one of the last big coal plants on the Colorado Plateau. And NTEC is banking on a Trump boost.
The orders are broken into two categories, those looking to boost coal mining and those dealing with coal burning. The main provisions include:
- Rescinding the Biden-era ban on new federal coal leases in the Powder River Basin and designating coal a “critical mineral,” thereby potentially giving mines more regulatory relief.
- Ordering Cabinet secretaries to identify coal resources on federal lands and propose policies to “enable the mining of such coal resources by either private or public actors.”
- Exempting facilities from the Environmental Protection Agency’s strengthened mercury and air toxics emissions rule for two years — while the administration hastens to rescind that rule altogether — including facilities in Montana, Wyoming, Arizona and Alaska.
- Directing agencies to identify regions where “coal-powered infrastructure is available and suitable for supporting AI data centers and assess … the potential for expanding coal-based infrastructure to power data centers.”
- Directing agencies to prevent large power sources “from leaving the bulk-power system or converting the source of fuel of such generation resource if such conversion would result in a net reduction in accredited generating capacity.”
Diné water and land protectors roundly condemned the orders, along with Nygren’s endorsement of them. In a statement, Tó Nizhóní Ání Executive Director Nicole Horseherder said that coal “has been disastrous for our health and planet” and that Trump’s efforts to rescue “failing coal plants and mines” could harm nearby communities. She also pointed out that Trump was ignorant of the financial barriers standing in the way of a coal industry revival.
Coal “has been disastrous for our health and planet.”
Trump’s approach is inherently flawed in that he operates under the assumption that utilities are simply aching to burn more coal, while the mining companies can’t wait to extract even more of it, if only the big bad federal government would get out of the way. So all Trump has to do is “unleash” the companies from those pesky regulations and remove “impediments,” and the utilities will swiftly rebuild all the demolished plants, while Peabody, Arch and NTEC will send out an army of draglines and restore domestic coal mining to its 1 billion-tons-a-year glory days.
But that is simply not the case. There are virtually no impediments now to mining more coal, period. Corporations already have access to and leases on billions of tons of coal on federal lands, and no one is stopping them from going after it. Biden’s moratorium on new leasing sounds significant, but in reality, it wouldn’t have any effect for years to come, because existing leases won’t be depleted for another four decades or so.
The domestic coal mining industry peaked in 2007, when it churned out about 1 billion tons of fuel for the electric power sector, along with a fraction more for export and metallurgical uses. It has been in a free fall ever since, producing just 500 million tons of coal last year. This is due not to regulations, but to market forces that clearly prefer other generation sources.
Fracking freed up massive deposits of previously unrecoverable natural gas, glutting the market, depressing prices and dethroning coal from its long domination of the U.S. energy mix. Wind, solar and other renewable sources are increasingly cost-competitive, and increasing battery storage is helping to smooth out renewables’ intermittency and bolstering the grid. Tech giants are looking to a new generation of nuclear reactors, geothermal energy and natural gas to power their data centers. None of them have expressed any interest in building a new coal plant, and it’s likely none ever will, given the economics.
Trump’s orders, combined with AI-processing data centers’ growing hunger for electricity, may help keep existing coal plants alive for a while longer. Take the Colstrip plant in Montana: Its owners, Talen and NorthWestern, want to keep the plant running, but have told federal regulators that the Biden administration’s moves to bolster the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule would force them either to install prohibitively expensive pollution controls or shut down. Trump’s exemption will allow them to keep running the plant and to keep spewing health-harming pollutants into the Montana air. Even before the orders, PacifiCorp backed off on plans to shutter some Wyoming plants early, citing growing demand and Trump’s fossil fuel-friendliness.
Others, however, appear to have simply fallen out of love with coal. Tri-State Generation and Transmission, for example, is moving forward with plans to retire the coal-fired Craig Station in northwestern Colorado and replace it with a natural gas plant and battery storage.
And then there’s the Cholla plant in Joseph City, Arizona. During the signing ceremony, Trump mentioned it by name, saying he was directing Energy Secretary Chris Wright to “save” the plant. “We’re going to keep those coal miners on the job,” he said. “Can you tell them to just remain calm, because we’re going to have that plant opening and burning the clean coal, beautiful clean coal, in a very short period of time. … Plants that have been closed are going to be opened if they’re modern enough, or they’ll be ripped down and brand new ones will be built.”
There’s just one problem: Arizona Public Service had stopped operating the plant weeks before Trump signed the orders, citing “increasing costs” that rendered the plant “uneconomical.” APS told the Arizona Republic: “At this time, APS has already procured reliable and cost-effective generation that will replace the energy previously generated by Cholla Power Plant.” King Coal appears increasingly ready to retire, and no amount of speechifying appears likely to change that, no matter how many burly miners are crammed into the room.
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