More facts showed up this week telling the same story about coal—the revival isn’t coming.

These new facts (see here for an earlier post about ‘stubborn facts’), courtesy again of the independent Energy Information Administration, show that coal production in the United States totaled 773 million short tons in 2017. This was up 6 percent from 2016, but better keep the champagne corked. The increase was due entirely to exports, a volatile market that is not conducive to long-term growth. To wit, in the five years from 2012-2016, exports swung from a high of 125.7 million short tons to a low of 60.3 million short tons.

In the vastly more important domestic market, particularly the electric power sector, which accounts for 85-90 percent of overall annual coal consumption, demand dropped, falling by a little more than 12 million tons in 2017. And those tons are never coming back: EIA’s latest Short-Term Energy Outlook (available here), its first to include projections through 2019, projects that electric power demand for coal will continue falling, dropping to 629.5 million tons that year, down from 666.4 million tons in 2017.

Continue reading Trump’s Coal Revival Nothing More Than Talk According to EIA Data →

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