President Donald Trump is scheduled to sign an executive order on Tuesday, which aims to boost the fate of flagging coal, Bloomberg reports.
The order directs the federal government to list coal as a critical mineral and force coal-fired power plants that were facing closure to generate electricity. The Trump administration is expected to express the directive as part of its efforts to increase electricity production as demand from data centers has skyrocketed.
The executive order may prevent some closures, but it rarely reverses the sustained decline in coal in the electricity sector. The share of coal generated 51% of the country’s electricity and has been steadily decreasing since 2001, when total consumption peaked in 2007. Today, the share of coal generation is around 15%.
Clean Air regulations have caused power plants to close, but the main driver is low-cost natural gas. Cheap renewable sources such as Wind and Solar also play a role.
Coal is the dirtyest way to generate electricity. It releases carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour than any other fossil fuel, and its smoke contains sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and fine particles.
Together, it causes a variety of environmental and health issues, ranging from acid rain and ozone to heart disease and perhaps Parkinson’s disease. The burning of coal also releases mercury into the environment, where it accumulates in fish and other animals, and eventually becomes humans who eat them. Mercury poisoning lowers IQ and causes birth defects.
The Trump administration may be even more fortunate in designating metallurgical coal as a critical mineral. Steel manufacturing, but not always, uses carbon from coal to reduce iron ore to pig iron, an intermediate material. Green steel techniques have advanced over coal-based technologies, but are usually more expensive.
However, in the electricity sector, coal faces major challenges. Existing power plants may have a short reprieve, but they will compete with the sun and wind, which are now cheaper and cheaper today. Everything except one coal-fired power plant in the United States is cheaper to operate than building new renewables.
Renewable energy can also be deployed faster than new fossil fuel power plants. This allows for the prospect of further remote new coal plants to address data center loads.
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