The realities of the energy market may jeopardize President Donald Trump’s push to renew what he calls “beautiful clean coal,” an industry that has declined for decades as it faces competition with other energy sources.
The Trump administration has made large-scale efforts to boost the coal industry through executive orders, congressional action, and deregulatory measures.
The administration considers coal essential for meeting today’s surging energy demand. But despite all of these efforts, the industry has spiraled downward for decades, and some analysts say that the Trump team’s efforts will not be sufficient to reverse that trend.
Market realities facing coal
The U.S. Energy Information Administration said in April that U.S. coal production has declined over the past two decades. The United States in 2023 produced 578 million short tons of coal, less than half of the amount produced in 2008, when U.S. coal production peaked.
The decline is partly attributable to the imposition of environmental regulations. Most prominently, the Environmental Protection Agency under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden sought to impose rules to limit carbon and toxic emissions from coal-fired power plants. Republican opponents accused the Democrats of waging a “war on coal” and said that the restrictions would mean the shuttering of plants around the country.
The rules have been subject to a regulatory and legal tug-of-war. Obama’s rule on power plant emissions was stayed by the Supreme Court. The first Trump administration proposed a rule with dramatically lighter restrictions, but the D.C. Circuit Court found it illegal just before Biden entered office.
The Supreme Court limited the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions in West Virginia v. EPA during the Biden administration, which later finalized a new rule to comply with the high court’s ruling that would have required coal plants to use carbon capture technologies to reduce their emissions by 90% by 2032.
Michelle Bloodworth, president and CEO of America’s Power, said, “The EPA regulations certainly under the Biden administration — they were really designed to shut down every coal plant in the United States.”
Now, the Trump EPA is taking action to repeal the rule.
Still, the regulatory actions against coal are only part of the story of its decline.
Scott Segal, cochairman of the Policy Resolution Group at Bracewell, told the Washington Examiner that economic factors have primarily driven the trend away from coal, noting that many of the toughest climate regulations were not fully implemented.
During the early 2000s, the development of fracking, a technology for cracking shale rock layers thousands of feet underground to obtain natural gas and oil, led to a boom in low-cost oil and natural gas. The Shale Revolution quickly made natural gas more competitive than coal.
“It’s not environmental law, but it’s more economic law,” Segal said. “The supply of natural gas went up. The cost of producing natural gas went down.”
“A single drilling pad could produce dozens of different wells … As a result, it became less expensive and more environmentally protective to produce natural gas. And those were market forces. Those were not forced by environmental regulation,” he added.
In July, EIA reported a price of $25.45 per megawatt-hour for natural gas at the Henry Hub in May 2025, while the cost of coal was $36.43 per megawatt-hour during the same period. Coal generated about 16.2% of U.S. electricity in 2023. Natural gas, in comparison, generated 43.1%, making it the single-largest source of power.
Brandon Dalling, an attorney at King & Spalding, said power producers will not spend capital to upgrade coal-fired plants unless they are guaranteed a long-term return on capital.
“In order to burn [coal], you need to keep spending a lot of money on your power plants to make sure that they are in tip-top shape to continue to burn coal, and that investment has not been as intensive in recent years,” he said.
Dalling said people have been more rewarded for investing in wind turbines, solar panels, battery storage, and gas-fired power plants.
“The market forces have resulted in coal plants shutting down, and less investment in coal,” he said.
Efforts to revamp coal
In April, Trump signed four executive orders aimed at revitalizing the coal industry. One of those executive orders, “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry,” invoked emergency powers to fast-track environmental reviews for coal-related projects. It also opened up public land for coal leasing and directed the Interior Department to designate coal as a “mineral,” allowing it to receive similar federal benefits as other minerals, including eased permitting and federal loans.
The other orders directed the Energy Department to identify and keep critical power generation online to address grid reliability troubles, such as coal. One exempted power plants from complying with the EPA mercury and toxics standards for two years. Lastly, the president directed the Justice Department to challenge state laws that targeted the use of coal.
The Energy Department has recently used emergency powers to keep the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan and the Eddystone oil and gas plant in Pennsylvania from retiring, citing concerns of being unable to meet energy demands within the region. The Department of the Interior has also taken policy action to make coal more accessible by reducing regulatory barriers and reopening federal lands.
“The administration does not appear to be attempting to change the fundamental economics of the power system through these executive orders. These executive orders still cast a weather eye on emergency conditions and seek to address those emergency conditions,” Segal said.
In Congress, the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act classified metallurgical coal, used in steel production, as a critical mineral, making it eligible for an advanced manufacturing production credit. The legislation also speeds up the review of coal lease applications and increases federal land leasing for coal.
Surging energy demand
Those in the industry argue that coal is needed to meet growing energy demand, which is increasing due to the rise of technologies such as databases and artificial intelligence.
Emily Arthun, CEO of the American Coal Council, told the Washington Examiner, “There has been a constant assault on the coal industry for several decades at this point, and I believe that policies have to be put in place to help this industry revive.”
“We have areas like in California that experience rolling brownouts and blackouts due to lack of resources for energy. And so it’s absolutely critical that we have this very important baseload energy source continuing to thrive in the United States just to meet our energy needs,” she said.
The DOE released a report in July that found that the U.S. will see peak hour energy supply demand rise by at least 100 gigawatts by 2030, with half of the demand attributed to data centers.
As energy demand grows, prices are also going up. Electricity prices increased by 5.5% for the year ending in July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index.
“We have been saying for the past three or four years that we are in the middle of an energy emergency,” Bloodworth said.
“We do feel like coal provides attributes that no other resource can replicate,” she continued. “One of those would be fuel security, 24/7 capacity, and it also can ramp up and down very quickly, especially during periods of extreme weather.”
In his first term, Trump attempted to revive the industry, including through proposals to boost payments to coal plants on the grounds that they produce reliable power, but failed to make any lasting changes.
This time, though, the White House created the Energy Dominance Council, led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, to coordinate among federal agencies on energy-related issues.
Bloodworth said the Trump administration’s creation of the council has made a “huge difference, even since the first Trump administration.”
Meanwhile, Ethan Tsai, project manager consultant at Rystad Energy, told the Washington Examiner he does not expect tremendous growth in the coal industry, but a decline in the retirement of coal plants.
“The truth of the matter is that coal’s still going to be around for at least another few decades. But the growth is not there. We’re going to be seeing a downward trend of coal within the grid space itself,” Tsai said.
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The EIA told the Washington Examiner that 19.6 gigawatts of coal capacity were scheduled to retire by the end of 2024. As of the end of June, 105 gigawatts are still on track to retire within the same time frame, although nearly 8 gigawatts have had retirement schedule changes.
“As we’re seeing more and more natural gas power plants ramp up, more renewables ramp up, especially with AI and demand for data centers, and the spike in electricity demand, coal is going to take a smaller share of that entire supply,” Tsai added.