The decline
of the US coal sector
Among the nonsense
from Donald Trump on how he will make “America great again,” he says that he
will revive the US coal industry.
But coal is having a
dismal plight in the US.
Revenues of the top
four US coal companies fell from $33B in 2011 to $150M in 2015. Coal’s declining role in the US power supply
saw it going from 50% in 2006 to 42% in 2011 to 30% in 2016. US coal production dropped 19% in 2016. In
2015, 11 gigawatts (GW) to 14 GW of US coal capacity went off line.
The US coal industry
took some comfort in that the 2017
first quarter data marked a sharp improvement over the disastrous year of
2016, with a 14.5% increase in weekly production and a 58% increase in
exports. But this is just a blip in the industry’s
decline since 2006. All the long-term US
and global indicators suggest US coal will continue it’s decline.
Forty-nine percent of this trend for a US coal market slump is attributable to natural gas and 18% to the
growth of the renewables market. Moreover,
the renewables market now represents the largest share of new US electrical
capacity installations, with 68% of new power capacity added in 2015
attributable to renewable energy sources.
This latter trend can only
increase with renewables having reached a point where they are among the least
expensive sources of supply.
Another 26% of the
coal slump is related to a lower than expected electricity demand and 3% to 5%
to environmental regulations. – Yet in Trump’s view, regulations have been a
key killer of the coal industry. Trump has got it all wrong.
As if that is not bad
enough, the least expensive, least costly and
easy to mine US coal sources
have been fully exploited, making a return to the good old cheap coal days
unlikely.
For many US utilities, investments in coal-fired plants no longer
make economic sense. The same is true
for railroad companies hauling coal. The
US railroad firm CSX announced it will no longer be buying new
locomotives to haul coal.
Trump’s
rabbit out-of-the-hat: Lift the ban on coal mining on federal lands
Nevertheless, Trump
thinks he has come up with the rabbit out-of-the-hat solution for the coal
industry. Specifically, he wants to make
federal lands available to the fossil fuel sector. This is a major policy thrust since 28% of the land mass in the US, or 643M acres is federally owned and 40% of coal mined in
the US is extracted from federal lands.
Within these public
lands is the Powder River Basin, in southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming,
one of the most productive coal mining regions in the US.
Conscious of the
environmental considerations, the Obama administration had imposed a moratorium on new coal leases on
public lands and adopted a ruling to eventually raise the royalties for
existing coal mines on these lands. In
the interim, a three-year study on the industry’s environmental impacts was
initiated.
But given the decline
in domestic demand for coal, the Obama administration ban on coal on federal
lands seemed, for some, to be a restriction on coal exports.
US coal
industry dependence on exports
With respect to
foreign markets, the US coal industry is dependent on exports to China and India. This
spells more bad news for the US coal industry considering China's war on coal,
solar coming in cheaper than coal in India and India’s renewables targets. To make matters worse, there is a lot of
competition of other global suppliers of coal to Asian markets.
Half of US
coal industry slump attributable to China
In effect, half of the US coal industry’s
revenue decline in the
last 5 years is associated with the reduction of US coal exports to China.
China, the world's largest energy consumer
represents half of the world's coal demand and
nearly half of global coal production. With nearly 100% of it’s new electrical
generation capacity associated with renewables, China saw its coal consumption
slump for a third year in a row in 2016 with a 7.9% decline in 2016, a 3.7% decline in 2015 and 2.9% in
2014. This slump will continue given China’s commitment
to invest a whopping $361B in renewables between 2016 and 2020.
The order of magnitude of China’s war on coal
entails a 10%
decline in the
percentage of the nation’s electricity sourced from coal in just 4 years,
from accounting for 80% of 2011 total electricity consumed to 70% in
2015. By 2025, coal is expected to represent 55% of China's electricity mix.
Concurrently, China is
also cancelling planned and under construction coal power plants. In January 2017, China announced it had suspended such plants that represented 120 GW. This is part of a continuing trend. China announced the suspension of 30 coal
plants in 2016 associated with 17 GW.
China is also cutting
the domestic supply of coal with a commitment that entailed the closing of 1000 coal mines in 2016 and not opening any new ones in the subsequent
three years.
Beijing is equally impressive in its war on coal,
having planned to cut 30% of its coal consumption in 2017 and having already pledged
to completely ban all coal use by 2020.
The city had previously announced it would close its 4-major coal-fired
plants in 2016.
US coal
exports to India wanes
As for India, a combination of renewables
cost declines and government policies is shifting the electrical power
landscape of India, the world’s other large coal consumer.
On the matter of the new energy
economics, at an auction in May 2017, the state-run Solar Energy Corporation of
India obtained a record low tariff of 2.44 Rupees (Rs) per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for
Rajasthan’s Bhadla solar park, a 10,000-hectare facility on the edge of the
Thar desert. This places solar energy at a considerably
lower price than coal-fired plants.
India’s largest power company, NTCP, sells electricity from its coal
facilities at Rs3.20 per kWh.
At the policy level, India has
targets for 100 GW of solar and 75 GW of wind installed capacities by 2022. But these goals of India may be too modest. In June 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that it’s 40% renewables target for
2030 may be surpassed by 2027. This could mean no new coal plants being
built in India until after 2022.
Recent data indicates that India
is on track to meeting its policy objectives.
Between March 2014 and March 2017 India increased its solar capacity from 2.6 GW to 10
GW.
The impact on the country’s coal
sector is already being felt. In June
2017, Coal India, the world’s largest coal producer, and
representing 82% of the country’s coal, announced the closure of 37 mines. Around the same period, the Indian states of
Gujarat, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh cancelled thermal energy plants.
This is quite the energy
transition because 60% of the country’s current electrical
productions stems from coal sources.
In parallel, the India
experienced a 21.7% decline in coal imports in January 2017.
The descent
of the global coal sector
Collectively, the
impacts of the decline of coal consumption in the US and China is a projected stagnation of global coal demand for
the next 5 years.
Globally, a record
breaking 64 GW of coal plant retirements occurred over 2015
and 2016. Global coal production fell 231M tons of oil equivalent in 2016 alone.
US is looking
in the rear-view mirror
US coal industry job
numbers confirm domestic and export market trends. The industry went from 800,000 jobs in the US
coal sector in 1920s, to 130,000 in 2011 to a little over 70,000 today.
Yet Mr. Reavey, chief lobbyist for Cloud Peak Energy, a US
coal enterprise with major investments in the Powder River Basin, had described
the Obama ban on new coal mining on public lands as a policy to restrict access
to satisfying market demand.
Fittingly, the Trump administration repealed the moratorium on new coal leases on
federal lands and froze the pending application of the coal ruling on raising
royalties pertaining to national properties.
The 2017 spike up in
the industry numbers may give the Trump administration the illusion (among many
of his illusions) that he is succeeding in reviving the US coal industry. But the long-term trends will continue to paint
a different picture.
