Posted on 12/07/2020 11:11:10 AM PST by buckalfa
Donald Trump embraced coal during his 2016 campaign. The crowd at a Charleston rally four years ago broke into wild applause when he told them, “I’m thinking about miners all over this country. We’re gonna put the miners back to work. We’re gonna get those mines opened.”
It has not worked out that way. In fact, employment and production are levels are behind where they were when he took office. We will get to the reasons for that in a moment.
But first, the Trump administration has tried to lend a helping hand to coal. Taylor Kuykendall, energy and mining reporter for S&P Global Market Intelligence, reported recently on those steps.
“The administration pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, put an end to an Obama-era stream rule regulating coal mines, replaced emissions rules on power plants, lifted a moratorium on federal coal leasing, proposed a plan to incentivize coal generation, facilitated an export deal for coal to Ukraine, paused a health study related to mountaintop removal and more,” Kuykendall reported.
Those measures were welcomed by the industry, but there were other forces at work, market forces that are making thermal coal less marketable. Add in the impact of the pandemic and coal companies’ backs are against the wall.
Just last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that White Stallion Energy LLC and Lighthouse Resources Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Those companies operate thermal coal mines in Illinois, Indiana, Montana and Wyoming.
The biggest blow to the thermal coal industry in this region came last year when Murray Energy went bankrupt. Owner Bob Murray, who has since died, was an active fundraiser and vocal supporter of Trump.
Metallurgical coal, which is used in making steel, has fared better than thermal coal because of exports, but that is a highly volatile market, subject to significant swings in demand and employment.
Trump’s promise to “bring those miners back” has not materialized. Kuykendall reports that coal mine employment fell to 40,458 jobs in the third quarter, down 23 percent from the first quarter of 2017 when Trump took office. Coal production is down nearly one-third (31.5 percent) in the third quarter compared with the first quarter of 2017.
Coal employment has also dropped in West Virginia. The WVU Bureau of Business and Economic Research reports that 13,191 miners were working in West Virginia when Trump was sworn in. Employment did increase in 2018 and 2019, but it fell to just over 11,000 in the second and third quarters of this year.
Clearly the pandemic has had a significant impact. But that is not the only reason. More power companies are reducing their reliance on coal, while shifting to natural gas and renewables. Just last month, First Energy, which serves the northern and eastern parts of the state, announced a goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. American Electric Power, which serves Southern West Virginia, is on a similar track.
President Trump gave hope to West Virginia coal miners and the many people who work for the companies that supply the mines. They rewarded him with an overwhelming victory in West Virginia in 2016 and again in 2020.
Some may believe that Trump broke his promise, or at the very least over promised what he would do for coal, but it is also possible that not even a pro-coal president could stop the hemorrhaging in the industry.
Would you spend billions building or updating shut down coal plants just so a libtard takes over and make them all “illegal” again?
That was the problem
Any industry lives or dies depending on how much the marketplace wants that industry.
The question is: Are politicians trying to kill the industry?
Trump didn’t want to kill the industry and he did want to help the industry. There are no guarantees in life, so maybe it hasn’t worked out, but Trump did what he could.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, wants to kill that industry. Wants to stomp it hard. That seems like an important thing to keep in mind.
The invention of directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing to produce cheap natural gas did more to kill coal than anything else.
But the need for natural gas arose from environmental regulations.
Now towns, cities, counties and soon states are working to ban natural gas. Our little town in California is proposing to ban NG in all new construction or extensive remodels.
The good news is that China is converting to electric cars and building 100s of coal fueled plants to power them. So more oil and gas for us.
Also 5 dollar gasoline and doubled utility prices won’t be helpful to re-elect President Harris.
We are still consuming the same amount of energy with that jobs lost in coal are jobs gained in natural gas.
It is a zero sum game.
Coal faces several problems - government direct subsidies and benefits to its competitors in “renewable energy,” the worldwide propaganda campaign against CO2, and more immediately, a technological revolution which made natural gas a cheaper choice for power generation.
The campaign against CO2, as ridiculous as it may be, seems to be a post-modern, global cult religion which no single politician can change.
Joe Biden wants to kill ALL industry. He wants the entire nation on the beg for a check from the federal government, medicare for all, please let me sir, dime. Nope, this is sadly the NEW Amerika. The Marxists will do more damage in the next four years that 12 more years of Trump in 2024 could not fix. The damage will look like the Titanic and the Iceberg. The Iceberg won.
I think miles driven is way down with people working at home.
But maybe home heating / air cond is up since they are there during the day?
The biggest threat to coal was always fracking and the lower price of natural gas. The only way President Trump could have saved the coal industry was by forcibly shutting down natural gas and it’s not the role of government to pick winners and losers. Did the FedGov bail out the buggy whip manufacturers in the 1920’s as automobiles became part of the middle class lifestyle?
The first whammy was natural gas.
The second whammy will be nuclear power now that Musk has explained that it’s the only clean way to supply the tremendous amount of electricity that will be needed for the millions of electric cars.
Not that I think electric cars use will reach Musk’s predictions, but the greenies will be emotionally swayed by him.
You still can’t change the regs which make coal less competitive to NatGas. Not to worry WV, Biden will stop coal fired power and kill your industry completely.
Wait until they try keeping all those new EVs charged up with wind/solar. They’ll be burning old tires to generate electricity.
After Obama and Biden it would have been a miracle for the industry to have recovered! All the coal fired furnaces had been closed down!!
But did they ? They have resurrected the call for a rail spur from Crownpoint NM, across the Bisti to the Coal Mine currently serving what remains of the APS powerplant and their acquired mine. A rail spur had been attempted for decades with the tribe fighting all construction and right of way needed across their sacred ancestral lands. But now with them owning the mine the rail spur talk is all rekindled.
It is surmised by many that they will keep the mine going, shipping coal to the west coast ports for shipment to Asia's huge coal needs for their coal plants.
Some things were not within Trumps power to change.
Fracking has made Natural Gas so cheap that coal can’t compete. Natural Gas right now has a huge price advantage right now that will be impossible for coal to even approach. Any new electric generation plant construction is likely to be Gas Generation.
Gas turbine plants also have a big advantage in simplicity of operation. A gas turbine plant can be “Remotely Dispatched”. That is that it can be brought on-line and be taken off-line by a central dispatcher located offsite of the gas turbine plant. No operator needs to be on-site of the plant. This is a huge cost savings.
The only thing that keeps coal plant running is the Electric industry’s imbedded investment in coal plants and a conservative bent toward having a diversified electric production portfolio.
The other thing that Trump could not change is laws already on the books that give “renewables” a competitive leg up on coal.
Trump did what he could to equalize coal’s place in the marketplace for fuel but it isn’t enough. Coal will have to find ways to streamline production if they are to survive. Congress also needs to make renewable compete on a realistic basis with other generation.
What is their "logic?"
There will be 50-million new Chinese immigrant American citizens by then.
I generally agree with you. Old coal plants were inefficient and were very dirty. The Clean Air Act and subsequent revisions did a tremendously good job cleaning up our air. Lots of new technology was invented to clean up coal plant emissions (that was the biggest chunk of my career). But those regulations did create the opportunity for natural gas fired combined cycles. Gas turbine technology for terrestrial power generation applications was derived from the huge aircraft jet engines developed to power the large aircraft. So you had air travel demand leading to larger aircraft demand leading to huge jet engine development which was then adapted to generate electric power on the ground at large scale and with very high efficiency (which meant lower fuel consumption costs). The possibility of those highly efficient gas turbine fired combined cycles led to the growth of demand of natural gas which led to fracking. So, in the end, there is this very complex interplay of regulations and free market forces all initiated by our once very dirty air. If you are old enough (like me and maybe you) you remember when the air was very filthy and not pleasant. Here in the Silicon Valley area, 30 years ago you had several weeks every summer where the air was a thick brown blanket of smog and you couldn't see across the bay. Of course, a lot of that was from the semiconductor fabs which left for other regions when their physical plants became too big for this congested area and the extensive California regulations and high housing prices drove companies and people out. In 2020, it's uncommon to have such a thick horrible brown blanket of smog. Again, the complex interplay of market forces and regulation at work. But I sure do enjoy the far cleaner air we have today compared to what we had 30 or 40 years ago. The big problem is the libs are never satisfied, they always want more, more, more, and the air and water can never be clean enough for them. As us oldsters who remember the dirty air and water die off, that reference point dies with us. Today's youngsters have no idea what truly dirty air and water were like.
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