Feb 24, 2024 By Richard Robbins 4 min read

During his campaign for president in 2016, Donald Trump promised to revive U.S. coal mining. “You watch what happens,” he said. “If I win, we’re going to bring these miners back.”

Of course it didn’t happen. When he left office in January 2021, U.S. coal mining employment was down 24%, while the production of coal had fallen 31.5%.

As one analyst put it, after surveying various administration measures designed to help bolster the coal industry and accounting for Covid, “plant retirements have continued at a quick pace,” coal company bankruptcies go marching on, and “utilities continue to back away from coal.”

Enter Joe Biden. According to S&P Global’s Taylor Kuykendall and Gaurang Dholakia, writing in May 2023, average coal industry employment began to inch up starting in the summer of 2021, six months or so after Biden took office. By the first quarter of 2023, employment in the nation’s mines was up 1.3%.

How did this come about?

First, the Russian invasion of Ukraine constricted global coal supplies, experts say. Exacerbating this situation were high natural gas prices. These two factors together sent European Union member nations scurrying for fuel alternatives. They landed, in part, on U.S. coal.

Another reason for the coal boomlet is perhaps even more startling than Russia’s all too familiar plunge into military adventuresome: the historical disparity (dating from 1970) between the price of thermal coal, mined principally in the western United States, and metallurgical coal, mined in Appalachia, has been turned upside down.

As recently as spring 2022, the price of metallurgical, or coking coal, was topping out at $349.91 a ton, while thermal, or steaming coal, had a per ton price tag of $104.24.

An S&P Global article in August 2023 noted that thermal and met coal prices had converged, “upending industry norms and pushing producers of met [steelmaking] coal to sell some of their product to electricity operators,” heretofore a sector serviced by the thermal side of the industry.

Based on anecdotal evidence, this unique occurrence has apparently impacted mining operations in Greene County. “Things are booming,” said a representative of a company that sells lighting and other fixtures to coal mines throughout western Pennsylvania.

“It’s been going great guns for the last 18 months,” he told me.

Coal exports to Europe and Asia are mainstays in the micro surge in U.S. coal employment.

Coal industry analyst Gavin Maguire, in a September 2023 Reuters article, noted exports were being driven by demand from some “key coal consumers,” including the Chinese and South Koreans. He noted total U.S. coal exports stood at 22.5 million tons through August of last year, up 18.3 million tons from the same period in 2022.

By email, Maguire insisted that despite a small dip in exports after October 2023, the demand for U.S. coal “remained pretty firm into 2024.”

In his Reuters article, Maguire emphasized the worldwide demand for U.S. coal, with nearly half of exports going to Asia, including 7 million tons to India, 1.1 million tons to China, and 600,000 tons to South Korea.

Europe accounted for 26.6% of American coal exports, Maguire reported. The Dutch led the way (3.2 million tons), followed by Germany (1 million tons), Spain (713,000 tons), and Poland (217,000 tons).

Elsewhere, Egypt bought 1.9 million tons, Morocco 1 million tons, and the Dominican Republic 462,000 tons of U.S coal in 2022.

These coal exports offset an overall decline in domestic coal use. A Commodity Insights forecast cited by S&P Global’s Kuykendall and Dholakia projected this downward trend will continue through 2027.

Meanwhile, let the good times roll. As of May 2023, both Northern and Central Appalachian coal mine employment were up, year to year, by 7.1% and 9.4% respectively, according to S&P Global.

However, don’t expect the Biden administration to bask in the spotlight over these almost too- good-to-be-true numbers. As it maneuvers for a carbon-free future, due to climate change, the last thing the administration needs politically is to be identified as aiding and abetting the world’s leading polluter nations, especially China.

The climate lobby would throw a fit.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.