BIG HORN COUNTY, Montana — Expansion of the Spring Creek mine in southeast Montana was recently approved by federal regulators, offering on-the-ground evidence of the President Donald Trump administration’s push to ramp up the mining and burning of coal.
In a series of social media posts and statements this week, Trump promises to open and reopen “hundreds of all Coal Fire Power Plants” and get the United States “producing Energy with BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL,” according to a Monday post to Truth Social.
The president’s statement followed a series of announcements from the U.S. Department of the Interior expressing a commitment to revitalizing America’s coal industry.
In the northern part of the Powder River Basin in Big Horn County, Montana, Navajo Transitional Energy Co. says the recent federal approval of its expansion plans extends the mine's operational life by 16 years, enabling the production of about 39.9 million tons of federal coal and supporting 280 full-time jobs.
Across the border, the PRB mines in Wyoming produced 185 million tons of coal in 2024, according to the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. It marked the first time since 1992 that coal production in the basin dropped below 200 million tons.
It also is the bottom of a long slide for Wyoming coal since its high point in 2008, when the Powder River Basin produced 446.5 million tons of coal.
The Spring Creek expansion adds to the pro-coal drumbeat coming from the White House, which includes a call for the EPA “to revisit soot standards and greenhouse gas limits imposed by former President Joe Biden,” according to Reuters.
“Trump already signed an executive order declaring a national energy emergency and directed the Environmental Protection Agency to boost fossil fuel production and distribution,” reported Bloomberg on Monday.
The report went on to note that coal accounts for about 15% of power generation in the U.S., down from more than 50% in 2000, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
Reversal Of Fortune?
The low point of thermal coal production follows a long trend of closing coal-fired power plants, which was accelerated under the administrations of Presidents Obama and Biden.
Between 2010 and 2019, the federal Energy Information Administration reports that 290 coal-fired plants closed, and more were scheduled to close.
Times have changed, said Travis Deti, executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association.
“It’s really nice to have a presidential administration that recognizes the value of Wyoming's coal resources and is looking to work with us to keep developing and using our coal, rather than to actively try to shut us down,” Deti told Cowboy State Daily. “I think what we're going to see is a real shift in the direction of the policy coming out of Washington, D.C.
“That's good for the coal industry and it's good for Wyoming.”
Economics At Play
Deti sketched out the general marketplace for coal as it competes with natural gas and renewable energy sources like wind for generating electricity.
“There are a lot of moving parts, but there's some things going on right now with President Trump and his efforts to reverse the Biden administration's policy of exports of liquid natural gas,” said Deti. “I think if we start exporting LNG and it's going to drive gas prices up a little bit more and strengthen those. And when gas prices go up in the United States, Wyoming coal is competitive.”
Rob Godby, associate professor of economics at the University of Wyoming, also zeroed in on coal’s competitors when asked about the future of coal-fired power plants, citing the financial benefits of electric utilities relying on wind and natural gas over coal.
“I just had a study published that looked at renewable costs across wind across the West,” Godby told Cowboy State Daily. “And just looking specifically at wind, if you compare those costs to coal and gas, they're lower.
“If you're a utility or you're an energy provider and you're looking to produce energy for a market, you want your source to be as cheap as possible, and that's why we're not seeing this flight back suddenly turning the keys back on at all these mothballed coal-fired power plants.”
Godby said the marketplace drives whether companies burn gas or coal in their fossil fuel plants, and they’ll burn whatever’s cheaper.
“Somebody's going to have to decide, ‘Am I going to make a whole new reinvestment in these plants to get another 40 or 50 years of life out of them. Or, am I gonna do something else with that money?’” he said.
Coal is still very much part of the plan at Basin Electric Power Cooperative, said Andy Buntrock, the company’s vice president of strategic planning and communications.
“It was decided early on that we go with an ‘all-of-the-above energy strategy,’” he said.
The cooperative never shuttered its coal-fired plants — Dry Fork Station about 10 miles north of Gillette and Laramie River by Wheatland.
“Those coal units are very vital components to that mix of providing energy. And those units are driven by what the market price (of coal) is,” Buntrock told Cowboy State Daily.
Buntrock said Basin Electric is building a new $4 billion power-generating facility called the Bison Generation Station.
It will produce about 1,470 megawatts of electricity, said Buntrock, and will be powered by natural gas.
‘Scary’ Times
For local activists in Montana concerned about coal emissions negatively contributing to climate change, the recent pro-coal push by the Trump administration is “certainly scary.”
That’s how Tom Baratta sees it. Baratta lives in Montana’s Bull Mountains near the Signal Peak coal mine, and north of the Spring Creek Mine in Big Horn County.
“What we've seen again just with the Spring Creek Mine, the federal land being opened there, that doesn't bode very well,” said Baratta, who worries about federal regulators not adequately considering climate impacts.
Court orders, including one that called for evaluations of the "social costs of carbon” when issuing permits to extract coal from federal land, don’t appear to carry the same weight as they did under the Biden Administration, said Baratta.
“We're really concerned that will have little or no teeth,” said Baratta.
That’s because Trump’s executive order issued in January titled "Unleashing American Energy" directs agencies to roll back National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations and streamline permitting processes.
“As a global citizen, we really need to start to consider those kinds of impacts and how we produce energy in the ways that we do,” said Baratta, who volunteers with the grassroots group the Bull Mountain Land Alliance. “That's kind of the scary thing for me.”
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
