FORT COLLINS, COLORADO — President Donald Trump’s efforts to help the US coal industry at home are being undermined by falling sales abroad amid… His trade war With China, new government reports show.
China has stopped importing US coal, accounting for most of the 14% decline in US coal exports so far this year, according to analysts and the US Energy Information Administration.
Meet Trump With Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week signaling trade progress. But whether it will include the US coal industry remains uncertain.
“It’s hard to know whether this will maintain the status quo or whether it will be an increase in coal and soybean exports to China,” coal analyst Seth Pfister of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said Friday.
Trump has loosened regulations and Open mining on Federal lands. The result was “keeping our lights on, our economy strong, and American energy dominant,” Interior Department spokeswoman Charlotte Taylor said in an emailed statement Friday.
The administration also cut royalty rates for coal mined on federal lands, and in September pledged $625 million to boost coal power generation, including by restarting or modernizing older coal plants amid growing demand for electricity from artificial intelligence and data centers.
However, recent government coal lease sales in Montana, Wyoming, and Utah have done so Failed to draw bids Accepted by the Ministry of Interior.
Pfister said that coal production in the United States has risen so far this year by about 6%, not because of Trump’s policies but because of rising natural gas prices.
Meanwhile, coal exports fell by 14% in the January-September period compared to the same period last year, according to Xinhua News Agency. The environmental impact assessment report was released on October 7.
The EIA said the decline came after an additional 15% Chinese tariff on US coal in February and a 34% reciprocal Chinese tariff on imports from the US in April. In a report issued Friday.
The United States exports about a fifth of the coal it produces. Most of it goes to India, the Netherlands, Japan, Brazil and South Korea.
China is not the top destination, receiving only about a tenth of US coal exports. But it has had a major impact on overall U.S. coal exports by halting all coal coming from the U.S. since April, said Andy Blumenfeld, a coal analyst at OPIS’s McCloskey.
About three-quarters of the coal the United States exported to China last year was metallurgical coal used in steelmaking. The rest is thermal coal that is burned in power plants to produce electricity, according to Blumenfeld.
Almost all of the metallurgical coal in the United States is mined from Appalachia, while the bulk of American thermal coal comes from huge open pit mines in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana.
Blumenfeld noted via email that the Appalachian region would benefit most from the resumption of US coal exports to China.
“There is optimism,” Blumenfeld wrote. “But there is little documentation to support that at the moment.”
Most of the coal heading to China last year went through Baltimore, with smaller amounts through the Norfolk, Va., area and the Gulf of Mexico, according to Blumenfeld.
Relatively little thermal coal is exported from the western United States because of the cost of transporting it by rail to the West Coast, where there has also been political resistance to building port facilities to export more coal.