Coal exports

The ongoing decline coal industry in Kentucky and West Virginia has forced a deep reassessment among workers: “What we’ve been doing is trying to transition into the 21st century and get on past coal.”

Cloud Peak Energy, a Powder River Basin producer whose business plan turns on exports, faces delisting on the New York Stock Exchange, potential bankruptcy, and is cutting employee benefits.

A federal judge dealt a “potentially fatal” blow to a proposal to build a $680 million coal-export dock in Longview, Wash. The project has long been on economically fragile footing.

Speakers at the American Coal Council’s annual coal-trading conference said a slowdown in global economic growth, rising trade tensions, and domestic political uncertainty imperil recent gains in U.S. coal exports.

The trade dispute between the U.S. and China is hurting American coal exporters, who have seen Chinese demand for U.S. coal fizzle after two years of strong gains. The recent trend may be difficult to reverse, in part because China has so many other options: “The risk for U.S. energy exporters is that markets, once lost, are difficult to recover, especially if your customer has readily available alternative sources of supply.”

A study published by West Virginia University’s Bureau for Business and Economic Research sees falling domestic demand for regionally produced coal. It also raises questions about whether export markets will hold up. “Both of the state’s producing regions will be hurt by weakening domestic demand, but Northern West Virginia faces greater market risk since most of the region’s coal is consumed by U.S. power plants,” one of the report’s authors said. “Southern West Virginia’s production should be buoyed to some extent by export demand, but output is expected to trend lower during the outlook as a growing portion of the region’s reserves become too expensive to recover.”

While U.S. coal producers are celebrating a recent uptick in exports, the change is likely to be temporary as buyers in Asia adopt new energy policies, and the improvement is relative: “Exports this year will still be roughly 37 million tons below what they were in 2012, when they peaked at 126 million tons.”

Assertions by President Trump that more “clean coal” is being exported from West Virginia to China as a result of his policies are not supported by fact: “Trump's claim is based on some factual information, namely that coal exports to China have increased in 2017. But his claims of coal cleanliness, his taking of credit and his suggestion that things are changing in West Virginia just don't hold up.”

Since 2010, six new coal-export terminals have been proposed for shipment of coal from Montana and Wyoming to overseas markets. Five were abandoned for an assortment of regulatory and economic reasons. Now the sixth has been dropped.