Coal's Steady Decline Continues Unabated, Despite Steady Honking & Blowing Of Politicians, CEOs
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Meanwhile, newly released data shows the coal industry is doing worse today than it was when President Barack Obama was preparing to leave office in January 2017. Coal production is still on the decline. Coal-fired power plants are still closing. And Trump’s own Department of Energy doesn’t see these trends reversing anytime soon. In other words, Trump hasn’t reversed the downward financial trajectory of the industry that started years ago.
New forecasts from the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) show coal production will decline by 1.1 percent in 2018 and drop by another 1.8 percent in 2019. Despite an increase in coal exports, according to the report, declining domestic consumption is making it unprofitable for coal producers to keep mining.
By next year, exports won’t be picking up the slack like they did in 2017. The EIA, in its latest Short-Term Energy Outlook released Tuesday, projects that both coal exports and domestic coal consumption will decrease in 2019. As a generation fuel, EIA forecasts that coal’s share of U.S. electricity generation will steadily decline from 30 percent in 2017 to 28 percent in 2018 and 27 percent in 2019. In 1997, the average share of electricity generated from coal had reached 52.8 percent.
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Since 2010, at least 50,000 megawatts of coal-fired generating capacity have been retired. “Those millions of tons of lost coal production aren’t coming back. We see an additional 15,000 megawatts of coal-fired capacity closing this year, with more retirements on the horizon in coming years,” the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) wrote in a report released in March.
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https://thinkprogress.org/latest-government-statistics-show-coal-industry-on-steady-decline-under-trumps-leadership-188e724520e6/
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