One of Donald Trump’s “innovative” decisions was the “revival” of the American coal industry, which was announced long ago during the election campaign. However, despite numerous attempts by the Republican administration to create the most attractive image of the coal industry as a “beautiful and environmentally friendly industry”, the future of such a policy is very ambiguous. The article continues the series of Igbal Guliyev and Sergey Volgin’s reflections on Trump’s energy policy.
On April 8, the US President signed an executive order with a loud and provocative title: “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry and Amending Executive Order 14241”. It talks about the historical role of the coal industry in the United States, and the need to develop it to provide cheap electricity and more jobs. But when listing the main advantages of coal as a primary energy resource, Donald Trump pays special attention to its “beauty” and “cleanness”.
In his executive order, Donald Trump ordered the newly created National Energy Dominance Council to recognise coal as a mineral resource, thereby giving it all the benefits of a US-produced resource on par with oil and gas. The order also lifted the Obama-era Jewell’s Coal Leasing Moratorium that suspended coal leasing on federal lands, ordered the exploration of suspected US coal reserves, and required relevant departments and agencies to abandon policies that discredit coal as a mineral. Moreover, this process was launched even earlier, and in order to create an extremely favourable atmosphere in the field of coal mining, back in March 2025, the Environmental Protection Agency began the process of repealing the restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions introduced under the Biden administration.
However, despite numerous attempts made by the Republican administration to create the most attractive image of the coal industry as a “beautiful and environmentally friendly industry”, the future of such a policy is very ambiguous. First, even during his first presidential term, Donald Trump actively promoted the idea of a “revival” of the coal industry. However, at that time, such a course of domestic energy policy hardly led to significant results. From 2017 to 2024, coal production in the United States decreased by 32 percent, and the total number of coal-fired power plants decreased by 383 units.
Second, coal has objectively lost the “efficiency race” to cheaper and more reliable energy sources – oil and gas, which flooded the domestic market of the United States after the Shale Revolution and the construction of an extensive system of trunk pipelines. We should not write off the Democrats’ long-term campaign to develop renewable energy sources, which also yielded certain results; today “green” energy also occupies a significant niche in the overall energy balance of the United States.
Trump is not lying in his decree, talking about the “historical role of the coal industry in the United States.”
Indeed, coal once accounted for more than half of the country’s electricity production. However, the newly elected billionaire president is being disingenuous when he points to its current status, since in 2023 coal’s share has fallen to 16% compared to 45% in 2010. The current state of many coal plants leaves much to be desired, and therefore the only thing that will truly delay their closure is a banal extension of their service life in the interests of the American energy industry.
In his executive order, Donald Trump refers to the potential for powering stationary supercomputers using artificial intelligence technologies with electricity from coal-fired power plants and orders a corresponding report on the possibilities of using coal-fired power plants in this area. However, even here, the most pragmatic in terms of efficiency and reliability in the long term, as well as in terms of price, are oil and gas: energy sources that have proven themselves in the American domestic market. It is also not entirely clear how President Trump is going to combine his course towards developing the coal industry as the main energy resource of the USA with the “Drill, baby, drill” policy, which assumes an increase in the volume of oil and gas production. As already mentioned above, oil and gas are the main competitors of coal in the domestic American market. Moreover, despite support for Donald Trump’s decisions among large coal companies, which have long been counting on support from the federal government in the confrontation with taxes on greenhouse gas emissions as well as phytosanitary control and the gradual withdrawal of their coal assets from the market, the influence of the Democratic wing of American politicians is still very strong, and they are not going to give up without a fight. The Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of 24 governors, representing (according to their statements) almost 55% of the US population and 60% of the US economy, has sharply criticized the executive order signed by Trump on “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry”.
A blow to the Washington swamp
The domestic energy policies of President Donald Trump and his EPA chief Lee Zeldin have been the subject of ongoing attacks from environmentalists and their fellow Democratic senators. The situation has become even more acute since Donald Trump signed an executive order on April 8 titled “Protecting American Energy from State Overreach.” In it, President Trump, citing the “threat to American energy dominance posed by some state policies,” directed the attorney general to focus on state laws aimed at combating climate change, potentially opening the door to several lawsuits by the Justice Department, also controlled by President Trump and headed by former Trump attorney Pamela Jo Bondi, against “unlawful” climate laws in certain predominantly Democratic states.
Among the “culprits” of the decline of the American energy sector, the decree lists New York and Vermont, which have passed state laws to combat climate change related to the “extortion of money from energy producers,” as well as California, which “punishes various enterprises with its carbon emission quotas” and pursues “catastrophic policies that led to massive fires in the fall of 2024”. Such measures can lead to a kind of “civil war of all against all” between the states and the federal government, states and private companies, private companies and the federal government, and so on.
Another field of confrontation between supporters of the previous bureaucratic system and reformers from Trump’s team has actually become the archive of executive orders in the field of energy and environmental regulations. On April 9, Donald Trump issued a new executive order introducing a new procedure for repealing “stale” energy regulations. According to the new legal act, authorised departments and agencies, including the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the US Army Corps of Engineers, and the Department of the Interior, are required to include “sunset” provisions in their statutes that will automatically terminate the regulations by October 2026. If the departments decide to keep the rule, it can be extended once for a maximum of five years.
Thus, it should be noted that the scale of the reforms of the 47th US President Donald Trump in the field of domestic energy cannot be overestimated. An active policy to stimulate American companies aimed at increasing oil and gas production has become the leitmotif of Trump’s energy rhetoric. However, despite the ambitiousness of the project, the objective laws of the market and the discrepancies between the domestic energy course and the vector of energy diplomacy in the international arena have led to a slowdown in the pace of implementation of the “Drill, baby, drill!” policy and the generation of a certain scepticism on the part of the American energy business.
The development of other projects related to the restoration of trunk pipeline projects has also stalled due to the unpopularity of this decision among a certain part of the American establishment and tense relations with the country’s Canadian neighbours. Large-scale reform initiatives in the style of “make coal great again!” have completely collided with the objective reality in which oil, gas and the climate agenda do not allow the one-time champion among American energy sources to raise its head and once again power hundreds of power plants.
