President Donald Trump will sign an executive order Tuesday designed to revitalize coal-fired power plants and the American coal industry, according to a White House official. [emphasis, links added]
The forthcoming order will direct administration officials to reclassify coal as a mineral under the terms of Executive Order 14241, which Trump signed in March to unlock and unleash the country’s coal resources, as well as take numerous other steps to boost the ailing industry, according to a White House official.
Coal output and its use to generate power have both declined in the U.S. in recent years due in large part to aggressive regulation and climate policy from the Obama and Biden administrations.
The order will instruct the relevant agencies to identify coal deposits on federally-controlled lands, and it will also direct Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to end the “Jewell moratorium,” which was a moratorium on new federal coal lease sales first imposed by former Obama Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, according to a White House official.
Trump to sign exec order on coal at 3pm
— Sam (@samouzon01) April 8, 2025
The forthcoming executive action will also direct the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to help other agencies implement the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) exclusions for coal-related projects and activity.
Other aspects of the executive order will include mobilizing the government to help find foreign buyers for exported American coal and advance coal-related technology development, according to the White House official.
The forecasted increase in U.S. power demand driven by the anticipated artificial intelligence (AI) boom is a major motivating factor behind the Tuesday executive order, according to a White House official.
Read rest at Daily Caller
The news from Texas is that this is going to be a hard road because gas companies are not rushing to take up the subsidies on offer.
Before the presidential election the United States was conceivably only one Democrat administration away from catastrophic failures in all of the grids. Even with the state of emergency declared to help coal, there is still a lot of work to be done to overcome the regulations that were designed to kill coal and gas.
It remains to be seen whether the the new regime can enable the country to escape from the jaws of the “wind drought trap.”
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/escaping-the-wind-drought-trap
This happens after conventional power especially coal runs down to a point where there is barely enough to service the base load overnight. Then the grid is vulnerable on nights when there is little or no wind during extreme weather conditions, aggravated by unscheduled coal or gas outages.
This situation has been brought on by neglect of wind droughts that were documented by Australian investigators over a decade ago.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/the-late-discovery-of-wind-droughts
https://open.substack.com/pub/rafechampion/p/we-have-to-talk-about-wind-droughts
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/escaping-the-wind-drought-trap
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/wind-and-solar-the-energy-thieves
The use of coal, along with nuclear which also needs to be expanded, is great for providing base load electric generation, superior to natural gas which is best used to handle the variations in demand. So increasing the use of coal will be a great for our grid.
Wind and solar are unreliable since they cannot be brought up on demand since there is no way to predict the amount of electricity generated by those sources due to variability of the wind and the sun.
Time to use our Natural Resources and not keep them in the Ground like some Idiots would want