Officials Examine the Presidential Impact on Coal in West Virginia

 

 

 

February 26, 2024 - Former President Donald Trump won nearly 70% of the West Virginia vote during both of his election runs. While there were many reasons residents voted in his favor, his support of the coal industry may have influenced more than 50,000 workers, their families or anyone with working light switches to vote in his favor.

In 2017, Trump passed the Energy Independence Policy, which superseded former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Obama’s Clean Power Plan would have caused major economic downturns in the energy sector and across the American economy, according to Trump’s White House.

Obama’s plan was never implemented because the U.S. Supreme Court stayed it in February 2016. Many states argued the plan overstepped the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act.

Trump’s White House estimated the Clean Power Plan would have cost the U.S. economy $39 billion and decreased domestic coal production by 242 tons per year. It was also reported that the plan would have increased electricity prices in 41 states by more than 10%.

Another Obama era policy, the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, reduced domestic coal production by limiting power plant emissions.

Plants had the option of purchasing costly upgrades to stay in business, but many plants locally and across the country closed their doors instead, said John Deskins, director of the Bureau of Business and Economic Research in West Virginia University’s John Chambers College of Business and Economics.

Under Obama-era policies, six West Virginia coal plants and “hundreds” across the country were forced to shut down due to regulations that placed undue financial burdens on them, according to West Virginia Coal Association President Chris Hamilton.

Under the Clean Power Plan and a myriad other “coal-killing policies” established under the Obama administration, West Virginia experienced nearly a 50% decrease in coal production — from 165 million tons to just shy of 90 million tons, Hamilton said,.

“A large portion of the drop in coal as a source of electric power generation came from [the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards] and the sharp drop in natural gas prices that occurred around the same time. The primary effect of the Trump administration was to cancel the [Clean Power Plan] and avoid further losses in coal production,” Deskins said.

During Trump’s first year in office, coal production rose nearly 20 tons in West Virginia alone, Hamilton said.

The state’s coal production stayed about the same in Trump’s second year, but by the time the pandemic was in full swing, production around the country shut down, and it took more than a year for it to recover.

In 2020, 89% of West Virginia’s electric generation came from coal, while only 19% of the nation’s was derived from the same source, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

But the country had been similarly sustained half a century ago.

In the late 1970s, when many of the state’s coal-powered electric generation plants were built, nearly 60% of the nation’s power came from coal, Hamilton said.

While coal is not embraced as much nationally, coal is still a predominant industry in West Virginia and a major contributor to the state’s economic health.

There are approximately 57,000 people in West Virginia who are involved in the mining process, including those hired through contractual work like mine equipment repair and manufacturing.

“Coal mining is a $14 billion per year business in West Virginia,” Hamilton said.

West Virginia’s nine coal-fired electric generation plants provide power to the entire state as well as parts of Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. To do so requires about 30 million tons of coal, which is a large percentage of the coal output at the current time, Hamilton said.

Many places, foreign and domestic, import West Virginia’s energy generation coal as well as its metallurgical coal for steel making.

Although 100 million tons of coal are taken from the ground in West Virginia each year, there still exists hundreds of years of coal left to be mined, Hamilton said.

“West Virginia has the top [number of] reserves in the country. And the United States has the most coal of any country in the world,” Hamilton said.

As President Joe Biden took office, many of Trump’s policies were repealed, revised or modified to no longer embrace the production of coal.

“[Biden did] everything in his power to shut [coal] down. And the power of the president is very strong,” Hamilton said.

Part of Biden’s energy policy started a clean transportation program that focuses on establishing electric vehicle charging and infrastructure especially in underserved communities.

West Virginia has benefited relatively little from these policies as only 0.4% of registered vehicles in the state are electric powered, according to a Stacker report from 2022.

Due to their inability to drive long distances without recharging and due to the lack of thrust when traveling over hills in the Mountain State, electric vehicles have not been embraced as widely by West Virginia businesses, Hamilton said.

However, the electric vehicles that are in West Virginia are powered with coal-fired electricity, Hamilton said.

Still, political challenges to coal production have already caused issues with the reliability of power delivery in other parts of the country. This is due to the unreliability of other energy sources that are now being utilized more and more.

Natural gas especially has problems in the winter, Hamilton said.

“Removing too much baseload generation basically affects resource adequacy and compromises grid reliability,” Hamilton said.

Energy producers have warned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Biden administration that continuing with these policies may upset the national power grid, increasing the likelihood for outages, Hamilton said.

China is now building one new coal-fired power plant per week because of the stability it provides their grid, Hamilton said.

The Biden Administration recently announced a new rule that limits soot emissions. While the full implications of the rule are not known at the time, Deskins “suspects” it has the potential to further reduce coal usage in electric power generation, in a way similar to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule, he said.

There were oral arguments last week in front of the U.S. Supreme Court about the Ozone Rule or Soot Rule, Hamilton said.

West Virginia was granted a stay on the rule this January, pending the outcome of its petition for review, Hamilton said.