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Contradictory Gas and Coal Boosting Plans
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/trump-appears-push-contradictory-gas-coal-boosting-plans-n712646
"President Donald Trump's plans to promote natural gas while protecting coal jobs may be nothing but a pipe dream.
On the one hand, he's pledged regulatory rollbacks on fracking and opening federal lands to boost natural gas production. But he also has said he's going to "save coal."
This Thursday he doubled down on a Trumpian paradox, saying at a GOP retreat in Philadelphia, "We're going to put our coal miners to work." Yet in a 2012 tweet he promoted lower natural gas prices, saying, "Fracking will lead to American energy independence."
He stoked the burning contradiction within the same speech this September as well.
"The shale energy revolution will unleash massive wealth for America," Trump told a meeting of natural gas industry executives in Pittsburgh. "And we will end the war on coal and the war on miners." Trump has stated his actions will help the country unlock an additional $50 trillion in untapped energy reserves.
There's just one problem. Both coal and natural gas are in the business of lighting American homes — and one can't win without the other losing.
"Unless the Trump administration wants to constrain natural gas production or drive up gas prices, coal will continue to fall behind cheaper and cleaner energy sources," Matt Lee-Ashley, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, told NBC News.
In the past decade, natural gas has been on a winning streak, with production increasing 10 trillion cubic feet between 2005 to 2015. That's lowered prices and made it the top choice for power plants across America.
A Cleaner Power Plan
Experts say energy from coal production could hold steady instead of dropping, if Trump repealed the Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants — especially those burning coal.
"Without the Clean Power Plan, coal basically flatlines, rising ever so slightly all the way out to 2050," said Doug Vine, a senior fellow at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.
But even if Trump is able to pause coal's death spiral, that is a far cry from "bringing coal back." There are no plans being considered for new coal plants, except one "clean coal" plant in Mississippi.
"I've suggested to Mr. Trump that he temper his expectations," top coal executive Robert Murray told CNN Money.
Coal jobs, he said, "can't be brought back to where it was before the election of Barack Obama."
Fracking Boom
Boosted by a fracking boom, natural gas has killed miner jobs and mothballed coal plants.
"Trump as an antithesis to climate policies will be quite helpful with coal," said Ben Zycher, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. He predicted there could be new coal mines dug in the western United States as a result.
However, "Reducing the regulatory burden on natural gas, particularly with fracking fields, will make life harder for coal producers."
It seems not even Trump can overcome macroeconomics with a pen or a tweet.
"He's going to permit pipelines, take away some restrictions on shale drilling, make it easier to drill, probably remove some restrictions on digging coal, but in the end this is the market that even he cannot control by edict," said Irwin Seltzer, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.
And while presidents have large powers over things like international tariffs, they can't order utilities to burn coal.
"The name of the game is natural gas," said Seltzer. "The game is over."
"President Donald Trump's plans to promote natural gas while protecting coal jobs may be nothing but a pipe dream.
On the one hand, he's pledged regulatory rollbacks on fracking and opening federal lands to boost natural gas production. But he also has said he's going to "save coal."
This Thursday he doubled down on a Trumpian paradox, saying at a GOP retreat in Philadelphia, "We're going to put our coal miners to work." Yet in a 2012 tweet he promoted lower natural gas prices, saying, "Fracking will lead to American energy independence."
He stoked the burning contradiction within the same speech this September as well.
"The shale energy revolution will unleash massive wealth for America," Trump told a meeting of natural gas industry executives in Pittsburgh. "And we will end the war on coal and the war on miners." Trump has stated his actions will help the country unlock an additional $50 trillion in untapped energy reserves.
There's just one problem. Both coal and natural gas are in the business of lighting American homes — and one can't win without the other losing.
"Unless the Trump administration wants to constrain natural gas production or drive up gas prices, coal will continue to fall behind cheaper and cleaner energy sources," Matt Lee-Ashley, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, told NBC News.
In the past decade, natural gas has been on a winning streak, with production increasing 10 trillion cubic feet between 2005 to 2015. That's lowered prices and made it the top choice for power plants across America.
A Cleaner Power Plan
Experts say energy from coal production could hold steady instead of dropping, if Trump repealed the Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants — especially those burning coal.
"Without the Clean Power Plan, coal basically flatlines, rising ever so slightly all the way out to 2050," said Doug Vine, a senior fellow at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.
But even if Trump is able to pause coal's death spiral, that is a far cry from "bringing coal back." There are no plans being considered for new coal plants, except one "clean coal" plant in Mississippi.
"I've suggested to Mr. Trump that he temper his expectations," top coal executive Robert Murray told CNN Money.
Coal jobs, he said, "can't be brought back to where it was before the election of Barack Obama."
Fracking Boom
Boosted by a fracking boom, natural gas has killed miner jobs and mothballed coal plants.
"Trump as an antithesis to climate policies will be quite helpful with coal," said Ben Zycher, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. He predicted there could be new coal mines dug in the western United States as a result.
However, "Reducing the regulatory burden on natural gas, particularly with fracking fields, will make life harder for coal producers."
It seems not even Trump can overcome macroeconomics with a pen or a tweet.
"He's going to permit pipelines, take away some restrictions on shale drilling, make it easier to drill, probably remove some restrictions on digging coal, but in the end this is the market that even he cannot control by edict," said Irwin Seltzer, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.
And while presidents have large powers over things like international tariffs, they can't order utilities to burn coal.
"The name of the game is natural gas," said Seltzer. "The game is over."
http://www.theintelligencer.net/news/top-headlines/2017/03/nearly-23000-coal-miners-to-lose-benefits/
"...Manchin, along with Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, continues pressing for passage of the Miners Protection Act, which they believe would solve much of the problem by re-directing funds to the UMWA pension plan. This plan was nearly fully funded prior to the 2008 economic recession. Declining coal demand since then has led to several large coal company bankruptcies, including Peabody Energy, Arch Coal, Alpha Natural Resources and Patriot Coal.
Further complicating the problem is that new technologies allow coal companies to extract the mineral with far fewer employees than the process once required. This means the number of active miners paying into the union pension fund is minuscule compared to the number of retirees and their dependents collecting benefits from it.
In fact, senators estimate the number of active miners paying into the pension fund to be only 10,000, while there are 120,000 retirees drawing from it..."
"...Manchin, along with Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, continues pressing for passage of the Miners Protection Act, which they believe would solve much of the problem by re-directing funds to the UMWA pension plan. This plan was nearly fully funded prior to the 2008 economic recession. Declining coal demand since then has led to several large coal company bankruptcies, including Peabody Energy, Arch Coal, Alpha Natural Resources and Patriot Coal.
Further complicating the problem is that new technologies allow coal companies to extract the mineral with far fewer employees than the process once required. This means the number of active miners paying into the union pension fund is minuscule compared to the number of retirees and their dependents collecting benefits from it.
In fact, senators estimate the number of active miners paying into the pension fund to be only 10,000, while there are 120,000 retirees drawing from it..."
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-promised-open-mines-here-s-why-unlikely-n716141
"In rallies across cross coal country, Donald Trump made a big, crowd-pleasing promise: He'd bring back the mining jobs.
"We're gonna open the mines," he said to big cheers in Charleston, West Virginia, as if the shuttered coal mines across eastern America's coal country could hit a switch and reinstate the jobs once he won the White House.
But experts say despite Trump's election, those jobs aren't coming back.
While regulation sped the shuttering of older coal mines in the last decade, experts say it was natural gas that turned the screws on the industry. Cleaner and cheaper, the natural gas market share is growing rapidly and putting as much — if not more — pressure on the coal industry as regulations.
"He can't bring back coal jobs in any meaningful way unless he's capable of inventing a time machine," explained Eric de Place, energy policy director of Sightline Institute, a progressive environmental nonprofit. "Waving your hands and saying you're going to bring the coal industry back is misleading at best, malicious at worst."
It's no surprise that Trump, who has positioned himself as a champion of blue-collar workers and a vocal critic of President Barack Obama's environmental regulations on coal, has rallied behind the coal industry, which lost 50,000 jobs during Obama's first term, according to one study. Robert Murray, owner of the largest private mine in America, is also quick to note that coal mines create jobs around them, as mining towns need doctors, lawyers, restaurants, and more, and their shuttering created the kind of economic anxiety that fueled Trump's presidential bid from the start.
But as the industry has changed, the geography of coal itself has, too. "The dominant coal fields are no longer in the East," De Place said. "The vast majority of coal is mined in the West and is done in highly-mechanized ways. That's not really reversible."
Rick Smead, a managing director at RBN Energy who specializes in the natural gas industry, agreed with De Place's predictions for the coal market under Trump.
"It's very unlikely that coal can regain its market from natural gas where they would be hiring a lot of miners back," he said.
There is some hope to stem the losses. Murray, who has met with Trump several times to advise him on coal issues, said the president can stop future jobs from disappearing, but he can't add them back rapidly.
"You can't bring it back, but he can stop the destruction right where it is," the mine owner, who cautioned Trump to soften his election promises during the election, told NBC News.
Murray said he believes he can compete with natural gas if coal isn't mired in regulations, but acknowledged that the slew of jobs Trump promised are unlikely to emerge from his industry quickly. Job growth, he said, would be completely dependent on the domestic economy.
"It'll be a function of how well America creates jobs," Murray said, noting that a surge in manufacturing — something else Trump has promised — would help.
Smead said the biggest coal boon from 2016 would have come not from Trump or Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, but rather Democratic runner-up Bernie Sanders, who promised a national ban on fracking that would have gutted the natural gas industry.
"That would have been a bright day for the coal industry," he said. "I thought it was ironic that the president campaigned in Pennsylvania and on the same day promised coal miners their jobs back and promised shale miners that he'd get everything out of their way — when in fact he was talking to the guy who just killed off the coal industry."
Trump's policies seem likely to make it easier for fracking and the natural gas industry.
In his first week in office, Trump signed two executive orders to advance the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline, a boon to the natural gas industry, which he claimed would create "thousands and thousands" of jobs. He boasted that the Keystone XL pipeline would create "28,000 jobs, great construction jobs" — seven times more than the government actually estimates would be created. The government estimates note that construction jobs could create more jobs through contracts, but none of their estimates rise to Trump's number.
Once construction is ended, however, the pipeline would create just 35 full time jobs. It's a number that puts a spotlight on the difference between the future of the energy indstury and the way the coal industry used to be.
"Almost anything else you do with a dollar of investment — including digging a hole in the ground — would produce more jobs than in modern energy production," De Place said."
"In rallies across cross coal country, Donald Trump made a big, crowd-pleasing promise: He'd bring back the mining jobs.
"We're gonna open the mines," he said to big cheers in Charleston, West Virginia, as if the shuttered coal mines across eastern America's coal country could hit a switch and reinstate the jobs once he won the White House.
But experts say despite Trump's election, those jobs aren't coming back.
While regulation sped the shuttering of older coal mines in the last decade, experts say it was natural gas that turned the screws on the industry. Cleaner and cheaper, the natural gas market share is growing rapidly and putting as much — if not more — pressure on the coal industry as regulations.
"He can't bring back coal jobs in any meaningful way unless he's capable of inventing a time machine," explained Eric de Place, energy policy director of Sightline Institute, a progressive environmental nonprofit. "Waving your hands and saying you're going to bring the coal industry back is misleading at best, malicious at worst."
It's no surprise that Trump, who has positioned himself as a champion of blue-collar workers and a vocal critic of President Barack Obama's environmental regulations on coal, has rallied behind the coal industry, which lost 50,000 jobs during Obama's first term, according to one study. Robert Murray, owner of the largest private mine in America, is also quick to note that coal mines create jobs around them, as mining towns need doctors, lawyers, restaurants, and more, and their shuttering created the kind of economic anxiety that fueled Trump's presidential bid from the start.
But as the industry has changed, the geography of coal itself has, too. "The dominant coal fields are no longer in the East," De Place said. "The vast majority of coal is mined in the West and is done in highly-mechanized ways. That's not really reversible."
Rick Smead, a managing director at RBN Energy who specializes in the natural gas industry, agreed with De Place's predictions for the coal market under Trump.
"It's very unlikely that coal can regain its market from natural gas where they would be hiring a lot of miners back," he said.
There is some hope to stem the losses. Murray, who has met with Trump several times to advise him on coal issues, said the president can stop future jobs from disappearing, but he can't add them back rapidly.
"You can't bring it back, but he can stop the destruction right where it is," the mine owner, who cautioned Trump to soften his election promises during the election, told NBC News.
Murray said he believes he can compete with natural gas if coal isn't mired in regulations, but acknowledged that the slew of jobs Trump promised are unlikely to emerge from his industry quickly. Job growth, he said, would be completely dependent on the domestic economy.
"It'll be a function of how well America creates jobs," Murray said, noting that a surge in manufacturing — something else Trump has promised — would help.
Smead said the biggest coal boon from 2016 would have come not from Trump or Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, but rather Democratic runner-up Bernie Sanders, who promised a national ban on fracking that would have gutted the natural gas industry.
"That would have been a bright day for the coal industry," he said. "I thought it was ironic that the president campaigned in Pennsylvania and on the same day promised coal miners their jobs back and promised shale miners that he'd get everything out of their way — when in fact he was talking to the guy who just killed off the coal industry."
Trump's policies seem likely to make it easier for fracking and the natural gas industry.
In his first week in office, Trump signed two executive orders to advance the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline, a boon to the natural gas industry, which he claimed would create "thousands and thousands" of jobs. He boasted that the Keystone XL pipeline would create "28,000 jobs, great construction jobs" — seven times more than the government actually estimates would be created. The government estimates note that construction jobs could create more jobs through contracts, but none of their estimates rise to Trump's number.
Once construction is ended, however, the pipeline would create just 35 full time jobs. It's a number that puts a spotlight on the difference between the future of the energy indstury and the way the coal industry used to be.
"Almost anything else you do with a dollar of investment — including digging a hole in the ground — would produce more jobs than in modern energy production," De Place said."
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