President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday that attempts to revive the declining coal industry, arguing the fossil fuel is necessary to ensure U.S. dominance in sectors such as artificial intelligence.
Flanked by coal miners, Trump said that he wanted the U.S. to compete with China and move away from policies instituted by President Joe Biden, whom he accused of trying to kill the coal industry.
“We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned despite the fact that it was just about the best, certainly the best in terms of real power,” Trump said.
The executive order will expedite leases for coal mining on federal lands, streamline permitting, push for coal to power AI data centers and make use of the Defense Production Act to “turbocharge” domestic coal mining, according to a White House fact sheet.
Trump added that he would instruct the Justice Department to “identify and fight every single unconstitutional state or local regulation that is putting our coal miners out of business.”
The Trump administration had already taken a number of actions that would support the coal industry. The EPA announced in March that it was reconsidering dozens of regulations finalized under Biden, including a rule that would require existing coal-fired power plants to control 90 percent of their carbon pollution by 2035.
The agency is also allowing polluting facilities, including coal plants, to seek presidential exemptions if technology to meet existing standards is not available and an exemption “is in the national security interests of the United States.”
Actions the administration has already taken to ease coal extraction include the Interior Department in March announced the expansion of a Montana mine, while the Bureau of Land Management this month proposed an emergency coal lease for public lands in North Dakota.
On the Senate floor Tuesday morning, Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., held up a lump of coal as he called for more production. The state is the country’s largest producer, followed by West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
“We need more of it, not less of it, to power our nation. Available, affordable, reliable. This has powered our nation for over a century, continues to be a major source of power for our nation and we need it far into the future,” Barrasso said, linking the Trump executive order to the goal of energy independence.
National Mining Association CEO Rich Nolan celebrated the executive order as a reversal from the Biden’s administration’s policies.
“The explosive growth and parallel energy demands of artificial intelligence and electrification have rendered that path not just unsustainable but plainly reckless,” Nolan said in a statement.
The Trump administration faces stiff, and possibly insurmountable, headwinds in reviving the flagging coal industry, which has been declining for decades under both Democratic and Republican administrations, largely due to market forces.
Coal accounted for just over 16 percent of U.S. electricity generation in 2023, down from 51 percent in 2000, according to the Energy Information Administration. Much of this decline is attributable to the rise of lower cost natural gas, which has less associated greenhouse gas emissions, and cheaper renewable forms of power such as wind and solar.
In February the EIA found that about 65 percent of the 12.3 gigawatts of capacity due to be retired in 2025 is coal-fired, or about 8.1 gigawatts. That’s 4.7 percent of the total U.S. coal fleet in operation at the end of 2024.
Kit Kennedy, managing director for power at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement that “coal plants are old and dirty, uncompetitive and unreliable.”
“The Trump administration is stuck in the past, trying to make utility customers pay more for yesterday’s energy,” Kennedy said. “Instead, it should be doing all it can to build the electricity grid of the future.”
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