Wyoming officials cheer Trump orders to save ‘beautiful, clean coal’

To the delight of Wyoming’s top elected officials, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders Tuesday to “reinvigorate” U.S. coal, but whether deregulation can change the tide of market forces remains to be seen. During Trump’s first term in office, the coal industry continued to lose most of its electric utility market share to natural gas and spiraled into a series of bankruptcies.

The orders will restore “beautiful, clean coal,” according to the White House, by “removing federal regulatory barriers that undermine coal production, encouraging the utilization of coal to meet growing domestic energy demands, increasing American coal exports, and ensuring that federal policy does not discriminate against coal production or coal-fired electricity generation.”

At Trump’s invitation, Gov. Mark Gordon was on hand at the White House to celebrate the signing. 

“This is a great day for Wyoming coal,” Gordon said Tuesday in a prepared statement. “We produce more coal than any other state in the nation. These executive orders will be impactful for our state’s coal industry and will help ensure Wyoming coal is available to help meet our nation’s growing energy demand.”

Likewise, Sen. Cynthia Lummis attended the event and lauded the president’s embrace of coal.

“Wyoming stands ready and able to support President Trump’s initiative,” Lummis said in a prepared statement. “The previous administration’s anti-science, anti-energy, anti-Wyoming policies cost good paying jobs, increased energy costs and played into the hands of America’s adversaries.”

The orders direct federal agencies to lift perceived regulatory barriers to coal mining and direct the Bureau of Land Management to “prioritize coal leasing and related activities, consistent with applicable law, as the primary land use for the public lands with coal resources.” Trump will also use his presidential emergency authority to allow utilities to continue operating coal-burning electric generation facilities previously scheduled for retirement. The president’s orders also exempt, for two years, coal plants from previous federal requirements to reduce toxic emissions, including for arsenic, mercury and benzene.

The actions, according to the Trump administration, are necessary to assert “American energy independence” and to ensure U.S. coal will help meet “the rise in electricity demand due to the resurgence of domestic manufacturing and the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers.”

How quickly the sweeping actions might slow or reverse more than 15 years of policy and market shifts away from coal and toward natural gas, wind and solar energy remains to be seen, according to some industry analysts. Regardless, many coal-reliant utilities have already delayed or erased coal plant retirement dates in recent months, including PacifiCorp, which operates several coal-fired units in Wyoming.

Conservation groups were quick to condemn Trump’s actions.

“Like his recent tariffs, the executive order that President Trump signed [Tuesday] presumes Americans are living in the distant past,” Western Organization of Resource Councils Board Chair Barbara Vasquez said. “It makes no economic, financial, or market sense and is simply a gift to corporate polluters that rural communities will have to pay for through higher electric bills, worsened air quality and toxic pollution of public lands and waters.”

Conservation groups also note that last year was the hottest on human record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and that Trump’s actions threaten to throw a wrench into efforts to reduce human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

“Donald Trump is hell-bent on dragging the United States back to the 19th century, complete with robber barons, smokestacks, crippling tariffs and measles,” Center for Western Priorities Policy Director Rachael Hamby said. “The free market has already made it clear that renewable energy sources are a cheaper and healthier path to meet America’s energy needs.”

Climbing out of the pit

The Interior Department responded immediately, directing its Bureau of Land Management on Tuesday to resume leasing federal coal in the Powder River Basin — the nation’s largest coal-producing region overlying northeast Wyoming and parts of Montana.

“The Golden Age is here, and we are starting to ‘Mine, Baby, Mine’ for clean American coal,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said. “Interior is unlocking America’s full potential in energy dominance and economic development to make life more affordable for every American family while showing the world the power of America’s natural resources and innovation.” 

The BLM, under the Biden administration in 2024, issued its final supplemental environmental impact statement and proposed amendment to land use plans directing its Buffalo and Miles City, Montana, field offices, to select a “no future coal leasing alternative.” It justified the move, in part, by noting that coal companies had not nominated a major new federal coal lease in the region in more than 10 years and that existing leases would allow mining to continue through 2041.

Wyoming and Montana sued the BLM in December, seeking to overturn the leasing ban. Now that the agency appears to be rolling back the ban under Trump’s directive — while the matter is still before the courts — it remains unclear whether mining companies in the region will produce more coal or nominate federal coal for new leases.

For now, U.S. coal remains in decline, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The production decline, at least for the next year or so, will remain most prominent in the Powder River Basin, according to industry analyst group McCloskey. 

At the same time, however, forecasts for skyrocketing electricity demand in the U.S. provide hope for Powder River Basin producers, who rely almost entirely on the nation’s fleet of coal plants.

“The electricity demand that these data centers require — right now it represents roughly about 4% of the electricity produced in the United States,” McCloskey Data Analytics Director Andrew Blumenfeld said during a webinar in March. “That is expected to grow to 12% of the electricity demand in the United States by 2028 — a mere three years from now.”

In a recent quarterly report call with investors, Peabody Energy — Wyoming’s largest coal producer — said that it is being approached by data center developers to explore deals for coal contracts, in some cases, to potentially build their own dedicated coal-fired power generation.

Is coal the future of American energy?

Gordon has long touted using coal as a stepping stone to prove carbon capture technologies at commercial scale — an essential strategy, he says, to keep Wyoming coal in the nation’s energy mix while minimizing the coal-fired electric utility industry’s carbon dioxide emissions.

“While the [executive orders] are a great first step, the real focus must not only be extending the life of coal-fired generating plants nearing retirement, but to actually pave the way to building new power plants,” Gordon said. “These are essential to our future. Wyoming is ready to lead the way and be a partner in that process.

“I encourage all Wyoming utility companies to carefully examine the possibilities provided in these [executive orders],” Gordon added, “in order to increase the use of coal and other sources of electricity to see that Wyomingites and other consumers have affordable, reliable and dependable energy.”

Meanwhile, conservation groups argue that fast-tracking fossil fuel production and consumption by eliminating regulatory checks is unnecessary in light of continually more efficient and affordable renewable energy. 

“We can meet that [increasing electricity] demand through a combination of renewable energy and [power] storage resources — that’s where we should be making our investments,” Earthjustice Managing Attorney for the Northern Rockies Regional Office Jenny Harbine told WyoFile. “This false narrative that coal is the fuel of the future is as deceitful as it is harmful.”

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The U.S. coal industry’s decline, Harbine added, is not due to federal policies. “It’s because it’s dirty, increasingly unreliable, and it cannot compete on a level playing field with renewable energy resources.”

If coal is indeed “clean,” as Trump asserts, then why do his executive orders include an allowance for coal plant operators to forego reductions of mercury, arsenic and benzene, she added. In fact, the U.S. fleet of coal-fired power plants is aging, with many plants that are beyond 50 and 60 years old. Utilities continually cite aging coal plants as a significant factor in rising costs, Harbine said.

Trump’s approach, according to Harbine, lacks evidence of actual, proven health and economic benefits.

“At some point, communities are going to say, ‘No. We deserve clean air. We deserve clean water. We deserve a future that is brighter and that invests in the new technologies that are available to us,'” Harbine said.