By Anya Litvak

May 5, 2021 - CONSOL Energy Inc.’s prediction that the middle of last year was the trough from which the coal-maker would emerge has so far held true.

In fact, the Cecil-based company took more coal out of the ground than ever before at its Pennsylvania Mining Complex in Washington and Greene counties over the past three months.

Photo: CONSOL Energy

It reported a profit of $26.4 million, or 75 cents per share, for the first quarter — about 10 times higher than the year ago quarter.

It’s not so much that American coal plants are huffing and puffing again — although the electric grid is actually using more coal now that it has in the past few years since natural gas overtook it.

It’s that industrial plants abroad are taking more of CONSOL's coal than ever before.

Nearly half of CONSOL's coal during the first quarter of this year traveled abroad, up from about a third before the pandemic. And much of it went directly to industrial customers who use it for their own energy generation.

Meanwhile, even the U.S. power market is warming up a tad to the coal it shunned last year.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration is projecting that coal use at the nation’s powerplants will increase by 13% in 2021, as the benchmark price of natural gas, the fuel that has been competing with (and winning over) coal in recent years, rises above $3 per million British thermal units.

We’re likely to have “a very different summer in 2021 than in 2020,” Anna Lenzmeier, an energy analyst at BTU Analytics, wrote in a note Tuesday.

“At these prices, we should see gas to coal switching in regions where coal and gas generation still battle for market share.”

That would be in the Midwest and Northeast, the markets closest to where Appalachian coal is mined.

This does not reverse the trajectory of U.S. coal plants, however, and CONSOL's CEO Jimmy Brock said during an earnings call with analysts Tuesday that the company is continuing its strategy of “reducing our exposure to the declining U.S. coal market.”