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Trump Said, ‘We Have More Coal Than Anybody.’ See Where We Burn It.
There are 206 coal-burning power plants left in the United States, which supply about 16 percent of the country’s energy. Experts say burning more doesn’t make financial sense.
After declaring a national energy emergency on his first day in office, President Trump said Thursday that coal could be a fuel source for new electric generating plants.
He announced a plan to issue emergency declarations to build power plants to meet a projected increase in electricity demand for artificial intelligence.
“They can fuel it with anything they want, and they may have coal as a backup — good, clean coal,” Mr. Trump said in a virtual appearance at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He added that if gas and oil pipelines get “blown up,” coal could be used as a backup energy source.
“We have more coal than anybody,” Mr. Trump said. “We have more oil and gas than anybody.”
While the United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas, and while it has more coal reserves than any other country, it’s only the fourth-largest producer of coal, behind China, India and Indonesia.
But reliance on fossil fuels like coal made the United States one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane, which have irreversibly heated the planet and driven global climate change.
Despite Mr. Trump’s talk about building coal plants, the United States has drastically reduced its coal generating capacity in recent years. Most of the decline came because natural gas, and now renewables like solar and wind, were cheaper sources of energy. A 2023 study showed that 99 percent of U.S. coal plants were more expensive to run than renewable replacements.
