by Anne Hedges
A funny thing happened on the way to Pres. Donald Trump’s deregulation of the coal industry. Coal companies across Montana and the nation have been clamouring for get-out-of-jail-free cards from the Administration for massive coal mine expansions and exemptions from environmental safeguards like the mercury and air toxics limits for power plants. However, the Administration’s latest attempt to give away public resources was a colossal flop. Not even coal companies want to bet on a coal resurgence.
When last summer’s Big Bad Budget Busting bill (inappropriately named the “One Big Beautiful Bill”) mandated the Department of Interior (DOI) offer four million tons of coal for leasing to private companies and decrease royalty rates paid to U.S. taxpayers for that coal, lawmakers ignored a few key facts:
- While coal was responsible for over 50% of the nation’s electricity production 25 years ago, that number had declined to 15% in 2024.
- Coal deposits are often found beneath public lands. When a coal company leases the coal, the surface (public land) is unavailable to the public, but more importantly, the land is destroyed by massive open-pit coal mines that take decades to mine and (hopefully) reclaim. Coal strip mines are massive, with some in Montana taking up as much land as the city of Billings.
- Coal’s decades-long downward slide is because there are cleaner, less expensive, and faster ways to generate electricity that don’t destroy public lands.
So, it wasn’t terribly surprising when DOI offered to lease 167 million tons of coal in Montana and received only one bid. The Navajo Transitional Energy Company (NTEC), which operates Montana’s largest producing coal mine, the Spring Creek mine, only bid $186,000. That’s about one-tenth of a penny per ton. For less than half the median price of a home in Montana, a coal company wanted to lease millions of tons of coal and eliminate access to thousands of acres of public lands. This low-ball bid was even too much for the Trump Administration. They rejected NTEC’s bid along with a low-ball bid for coal in Utah and cancelled a similar lease sale in Wyoming in fear that the result would be similarly inadequate.
The coal industry is in a downward spiral, yet this Administration is trying to prop it up by eliminating regulations such as the mercury and air toxics standard for coal-fired power plants, decreasing regulations for water pollution from coal mines, using taxpayer money to prop up power plants, lowering royalty rates, bypassing public involvement processes, and curtailing environmental analyses. Amidst all of this deregulation, it’s nice to see that there is a limit to how low they’ll go for a dying industry.
This article was published in the December 2025 issue of Down To Earth.
