December 11, 2018 - Many are pointing to a new report showing U.S. coal consumption has dropped to a 39-year low as evidence that the Trump administration’s efforts to revive the coal industry have failed.

This year, coal consumption is projected to fall to its lowest level since 1979, according to a report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

However, the truth is coal’s gloomy future was locked into place long before President Trump was elected.

Coal’s demise stems from reform of carbon limits in the nation’s New Source Performance Standard, not the removal of Obama’s signature Clean Power Plan, which changed carbon limits for existing power plants. In scrapping the Clean Power Plan, the goal was to give power producers the flexibility they needed to keep providing reliable, cost-effective power to their customers. The end game was never about reversing the steady decline in U.S. coal consumption.

That trend will continue due to old plants equipped with outdated and inefficient technologies. More concerning, though, is that no new coal plants are being built in the United States, where coal is cheap and abundant.

What’s keeping coal from moving forward and playing a role in America’s plan to meet energy demand is an Obama-era reform that established unrealistic carbon dioxide limits for coal-fired power plants. The New Source Performance Standard was changed in 2015, establishing a C02 limit of 1,400 pounds per megawatt-hour for new plants.

The new standard can’t be achieved without installing a carbon capture and storage system, a very expensive and questionable technology. If the standard were based on proven solutions such as supercritical and ultra-supercritical emission technologies, the nation would be pursuing new coal projects today and the development of CCS technology would be accelerating.

U.S. policy now prohibits power producers from building the most advanced coal-fired plants. Draconian limits for CO2 emissions, enacted under the previous administration, make it practically impossible for U.S. power producers to build supercritical and ultra-supercritical coal-fired plants, which are low-cost, low-emission, high-output and highly efficient sources of power.

Coal deserves a more significant role in the nation’s strategy to meet energy demand. Acknowledging this need, the EPA announced last week plans to rescind the controversial CO2 limit for new power plants. It’s a bold move that will give power producers more flexibility in meeting consumers’ needs with a more balanced power portfolio. As we see it, such action would bring more balance between the economic concerns, reliability concerns and environmental concerns of power generation.