In 2025, the Trump administration threw its weight behind the coal industry.
“I call it beautiful clean coal,” Pres. Donald Trump said during an executive order signing on April 8, 2025. “I tell my people, never use the word coal unless you put ‘beautiful, clean’ before it. Right doc? So we call it beautiful clean coal. Beautiful clean coal.”
Trump promised to revive it from its decade plus decline, emphasizing its value as a source of power, energy security and jobs. In the spring, he signed an executive order called Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry.
“We’ll streamline permitting, we will end the government bias against coal and we’re going to unlock the sweeping authorities of Defense Production Act – the Defense Production Act – to turbo charge coal mining in America. They made it impossible,” he said.
These moves were cheered on by many in Wyoming. The state produces the majority of the nation’s coal and depends on those revenues.
So, how did coal production fare in 2025?
Wyoming Public Radio’s Caitlin Tan spoke with University of Wyoming Economics Associate Professor Rob Godby. They talked at the end of 2025.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Cailin Tan: Rob, how did coal fare this year in 2025?
Rob Godby: This year in Wyoming, it'll be probably the second-worst year ever [in the modern mining age, which includes the Powder River Basin], after last year. It's not great by historical standards at all. We're about 60% below our height. That was about 15 years ago.
But you know, if you're looking for a little bit of an optimistic outlook, it's better than last year [2024].
We went into last year with a lot of coal sitting at coal fired power plants, so they didn't really get a big spring delivery schedule. It really dropped off in 2024, and that didn't happen in 2025.
But really, the bigger story was that natural gas prices were much higher in the last half of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, and so a lot more coal was used. Just broadly speaking, coal struggles when gas prices are lower.
But pessimists would have said, ‘Well, could it have been worse?’ I guess. And the answer is, unfortunately, yes. The long-term outlook for coal is that we just continue this secular decline over time. The curve might have flattened a little bit, in terms of the trend downward, but most analysts expect that that downward trend will continue, and really, it just comes down to cost.
It's just more expensive to run a coal fired power plant. Over the last 25 years, power companies have primarily built gas fired or renewable energy power plants, as opposed to coal fired power plants. In Wyoming, the last one was built in 2011, 2012, and that one is considered the only power plant in the country that can compete with renewable energy. It's right next to the cheapest source of coal in the country.
CT: Is that Dry Fork, near Gillette?
RB: Yeah. Dry Fork is the least cost plant in the country. The bottom line is, our energy system is evolving towards a renewable basis, with natural gas as the fossil fuel backup.
CT: Obviously, the Trump administration has made a lot of moves to try to, I guess, make coal less expensive of an industry...
RB: Yeah.
CT: …to try to deregulate. Could we see trickle effects from that over the next couple years, where it is more affordable to use coal? Or is it still just you're working against the age of power plants?
RB: That's the big problem, right? One of the things that the Trump administration has done is use these emergency orders to basically delay retirements of coal fired power plants. There's been a few power plants in the country where, literally, the operators want to shut them down, and then at the 11th hour, they've gotten this emergency order that says they can't do that.
The justification is usually some sort of grid integrity sort of argument, that we need that extra power. It is the case that demand has increased, and that does put a lot more stress on the power grid, but that has been a real challenge to keep these plants open that were getting ready to close, because they haven't seen a lot of investment in the last few years.
When you know a plant is close to retirement, it's kind of like an old car. You get to the point where you say, ‘I don't think it's worth it to put new tires on it, or to replace the brakes.’ You're just going to drive it until, really, it makes more sense to buy a brand new one.
The other big problem is the Trump administration will only be around until 2028, and then we don't know what happens after that. Given the fact that the alternatives to coal just keep getting cheaper and cheaper – natural gas, renewables, we're seeing new types of energy come onto the grid – all of those things make it more difficult to imagine a world 20 years from now that really needs coal to operate the way it does today.
The bottom line is that the Trump administration can kind of bend that curve with respect to the decline of coal, make it a little flatter. But at the end of the day, short of some major requirement to rebuild and to increase the number of coal fired power plants, the main source of demand for coal, which is power generation, [is] going to continue to decline, and as it declines, so will mining.
CT: This past fall, the Trump administration had scheduled a couple coal lease sales. They were the first in over a decade for our region. There was one in Montana and Wyoming. But the one in Montana got really low bids from companies themselves, and then the one in Wyoming was canceled shortly after.
RB: In Montana, they literally offered pennies per ton, not even pennies sometimes. Effectively, the price was, ‘Give us the coal for free, and we'll take the lease.’ That really kind of tells you what the value of coal is in the market right now. There's just really not a need for new sources of coal. There's enough existing coal out there to satisfy the demand in most cases for a long time yet.
There are a few situations where it might be beneficial to get a lease in a particular place, because it just helps you operationally. But altogether, the fact that they've had to cancel lease sales when this is such a pro coal administration tells you that even the White House can't offset markets. Markets are really the final determinant of whether coal is going to be around in the power generation market.
