Has Trump helped the coal industry? Depends who you ask - Entrepreneur Generations

President Trump took office, he pledged to revive the ailing coal industry from the start, but has he? He fulfilled most of the items on a wish list sent by Murray Energy coal magnate and financial supporter Robert Murray, and though industry numbers have improved somewhat, "no one is naïve enough to think that coal will return anytime soon to its glory days, when it fueled more than half of the nation’s electricity generation, employment reflected robust production and coal was fetching high prices in overseas steelmaking centers," Michael Collins reports for USA Today.

The numbers say he hasn't moved the needle much, and most gains weren't because of policy change: About 1,300 net coal jobs have been gained since Trump took office, and coal production in 2017 went up to 774 million tons in 2017, a 6 percent gain over 2016. But the increase in production is mostly because of lower production costs, which happened because several major coal companies went bankrupt and restructured.

Meanwhile coal consumption fell slightly from 2016 to 717 million tons in 2017. "Even more alarming for the industry: Almost all domestic coal consumption is in the power sector, yet despite an increase in natural gas prices in 2017, coal’s share of power generation for the year was just 30 percent, the lowest on record and lower than natural gas for the second year in a row," Collins reports. Coal exports increased 61 percent in 2017 from 2016, but analysts say the bump is short-lived and caused by international market factors.

Coal industry insiders say those numbers don't tell the whole story, and insist Trump has helped because he made miners feel more hopeful about the future and jettisoned regulations they felt hampered the industry. "What has happened, I think, is it has given the industry and investors the assurance that at least their government is not going to discourage production and we only have to deal with the marketplace," Luke Popovich, a spokesperson for the National Mining Association, told Collins. "Instead of having to fight natural gas, subsidized renewals and our own government, now we are at least free to compete in the marketplace. That has been the big change as far as we’re concerned."

Terry Headley of the American Coal Council says employment numbers don't show that many miners have returned to work as contractors. And some coal country counties have seen strong recovery since Trump became president: Coal jobs in West Virginia rose more than 15 percent in 2017, for example. According to several local leaders in coal country that Collins interviewed, many coal country residents believe Trump is responsible for last year's industry gains, and they think coal is stable and will be for a while, but they don't think coal will boom again.

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