President Donald Trump is set to sign an executive order on Tuesday aimed at boosting coal’s flagging fortunes, reports Bloomberg.
The order will direct the federal government to list coal as a critical mineral and force some coal-fired power plants that had faced closure to keep generating electricity. The Trump administration is expected to couch the directive as part of an effort to ramp up electricity production as demand from data centers surges.
While the executive order might forestall some closures, it’s unlikely to reverse coal’s persistent decline in the power sector. Coal’s share has declined steadily since 2001, when it generated 51% of the country’s electricity, and gross consumption peaked in 2007. Today, coal’s share of generation is about 15%.
Clean air regulations have caused some power plant closures, but the major driver has been low-cost natural gas. Cheap renewable sources like wind and solar have played a part as well.
Coal is the dirtiest way to generate electricity. It releases more carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour than any other fossil fuel, and its smoke is laden with sulfur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, and fine particulates.
Together, they cause a range of environmental and health problems, from acid rain and ozone to heart disease and possibly Parkinson’s. Burning coal also releases mercury into the environment, where it accumulates in fish and other animals, eventually ending up in the humans who eat them. Mercury poisoning lowers IQ and causes birth defects.
The Trump administration may have more luck in designating metallurgical coal as a critical mineral. Steelmaking often, though not always, uses carbon from coal to reduce iron ore to pig iron, an intermediary material. While green steel techniques have made headway against coal-based ones, they’re still typically more expensive.
But in the power sector, coal faces significant challenges. Existing power plants might get a brief reprieve, but they’ll be competing with solar and wind, which are cheap today and getting cheaper. All but one coal-fired power plant in the U.S. is less expensive to operate than building new renewables.
Renewables can also be deployed faster than new fossil fuel power plants, which makes the prospect of building new coal plants to cope with data center loads even more remote.
Tim De Chant is a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was founding editor. De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA degree in environmental studies, English, and biology from St. Olaf College.
