Will We Increase Coal Production To Make America Great Again?

Last Updated on: 4th July 2025, 08:35 pm

I have a prediction for coal miners: I know you might expect relief from Donald Trump & cronies, but I don’t think it can come from them. The actions already taken by this regime will make it a fruitless effort. My best wishes to you — I really believe coal miners are among the great Americans, a group of people who face danger to work hard. But Donald Trump, who lost about a quarter of all coal miners their jobs in his first term, will make it worse this time. My guess is it could be much worse before he is done.

I am not using a crystal ball or consulting horoscopes to come to this conclusion. I am just looking at the cold, hard facts. If I put the issue into its shortest form, it becomes quite simple. The Trump administration has a big problem trying to come up with a unified approach to anything.

The approach Trump took to coal in his first term illustrates the problem. Trump may have said that he “digs coal,” but the swinging shovel at a political rally never accomplished anything except to move miners to vote.

Instead of supporting coal, what Trump did was to push support for fracking. Not many fracked gas wells produced anything, but enough did that coal was under difficult competition. And there were other problems. Something like 20% or more of all coal mining jobs were lost during the term Trump was in office. And such a large number of mining companies went bankrupt that the Dow Jones Coal Index of the time ($DJUSCL) stopped operating altogether.

This time, I suspect it will be worse. We have to recognize that the coal industry has no new generating facilities in a queue to open. There are not even any planned, and if there were, it would take more years to develop them than Trump has left in his term.

That is not all. After Trump’s destruction hit the coal industry during his first term, the industry recovered a bit by increasing exports. That is not an option open to the industry now because of Trump’s fondness for tariffs. No one would buy coal from the United States now, because the United States is playing games with international markets.

In the “Energy Infrastructure Update for April 2025,” which FERC released on July 1, the table “Generation Capacity Additions and Retirements, (May 2025 – April 2028)” on page 7 shows highly probable installation of coal-burning generating capacity of 0 megawatts (MW) and expected retirements of 24,373 MW. That means a reduction of 12% to 13% in coal-burning generating capacity during the three year period.

In the same time, the table shows highly probable installations of 22,975 MW of wind capacity and 90,175 MW of solar. There is nearly no capacity of these two power sources being lost.

Despite the efforts of the Trump Regime, these numbers are still likely. I am not saying this because FERC published them six months after Trump took office. This is really more of a practical matter. It takes time to develop new capacity. Though, the time varies from one technology to another. Developing solar is extraordinarily fast. Wind is often pretty fast. Natural gas development depends on gas supplies being in place, so doing it from scratch can be slow. Trump wants nuclear power to come online fast, but we have not seen it happen yet. And before small modular reactors can be built, the factories for building them have to be built.

Getting back to coal, I would note that the narrative on the history of coal has been politicized. Any recent history is questionable. We can see from the raw numbers that Trump’s first term in office led to about 20% of miners losing their jobs. But we might ask: When did the “War on Coal” start?

It was not Joe Biden or Barak Obama who started the move away from coal. That happened about 120 years ago, I believe, when the U.S. Navy decided to stop producing war ships that burned coal. They started small, in the first decade of the 20th century, but the last capital ships to be coal burners were built before the U.S. got into WWI. Coal increased until 1923, however, even without the Navy as a buyer. That year, there were about 800,000 miners in this country. Today, we have about 40,000. There were big reductions during various times. Numbers of miners actually grew during Obama’s first term in office. And they fell during Trump’s. They may or may not have grown slightly while Joe Biden was in office (numbers differ). But now it is Trump’s turn to stun the industry with his magic.

In my opinion, any money spent on supporting coal mines is going down into the sump, whence it will never be recovered. We’d be a lot better off training miners to do installations or maintenance on wind turbines or solar farms. So would they.

Please note: Two U.S. Navy aircraft carriers did burn coal during WWII. They were the U.S.S. Wolverine, IX-64, and U.S.S. Sable, IX-81. They were not combat ships. They were the only side-paddle ships used by the Navy during the 20th century. They were based in Chicago and never left freshwater. Both were used to train pilots. The Canadians never protested.

Image: U.S.S. Texas, burning coal in sea trials, 1913. Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.