[direwolf]

Since we're on the subject of coal:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.a03faf695e46

“I made them this promise,” Trump said, “we will put our miners back to work.”

But industry experts say coal mining jobs will continue to be lost, not because of blocked access to coal, but because power plant owners are turning to natural gas. At least six plants that relied on coal have closed or announced they will close since Trump’s victory in November, including the main plant at the Na###o Generating Station in Arizona, the largest in the West. Another 40 are projected to close during the president’s four-year term.

As power companies switch fuels, “the amount of coal in the national energy generation mix (both Fuels and Electricity Generation) has declined by 53 percent since 2006,” according to a Department of Energy report released in January. Over the same period, electricity generation from natural gas increased 33 percent.

The shift was mirrored by employment, with jobs in natural gas and other cleaner energy resources rising and coal jobs declining, the report said. It cited a Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis showing that coal mining and support employment declined by nearly 40 percent between March 2009 and March 2016.

In this shaky financial environment, coal companies are struggling. Two of the largest, Contura and Arch Coal, emerged from bankruptcy only recently, and another giant, Peabody Energy, recently filed a reorganization plan for its path out of bankruptcy, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

As Trump vowed to resurrect the coal industry and mining jobs in remarks at the Environmental Protection Agency, he promised to increase production of the resource that experts say is killing them. “We will unlock job producing natural gas, oil and shale energy. We will produce American coal to power American industry.”

The IEEFA disagreed. “Promises to create more coal jobs will not be kept — indeed the industry will continue to cut payrolls,” the group said in its 2017 U.S. Coal Outlook. “These losses will be related in part to the coal industry’s long-term business model of producing more coal with fewer workers.”