Last week, I explained that the "War on Coal" Is Really A Competition Issue, with cheap natural gas prices as a major reason coal production and use have declined. Beyond the impact of natural gas on coal jobs, technology is also an issue. Technology is making mining more efficient, but it is making the market harder for coal miners. Following is a chart I created from Energy Information Administration data that shows coal production and employment statistics for 2013 and 2014.

Coal Production Data

Coal-Related Employment Data

The data show the coal-production and employment figures for 2013 and 2014.  Surface mining in the Powder River Basin (the highest producing region in the country) increased coal production 2.6% and employment dropped 0.6%, while underground mining production for Appalachia increased 2.8% even though employment dropped 8.9%.  For the United States, overall coal production increased 1.5% between 2013 and 2014, while the number of employees dropped 6.8%. Thus, even as coal production increased modestly, the number of employees holding those jobs declined significantly. 

This doesn't deter politicians from making other claims, though.  As I noted last week, the presidential race has included rhetoric claiming anti-coal regulations are what really hurt coal jobs. And it's not just at the presidential level.  Coal states often feature politicians promising to bring back coal jobs. In my home state of West Virginia, for example, both candidates for governor are making such a promise.  

As an aside, in the Ohio U.S. Senate race between Rob Portman and Ted Strickland, Sen. Portman has made use of this similar line of attack, claiming that former Ohio and governor and U.S. Representative Strickland "turned his back" on Ohio by not supporting coal jobs. The advertisement, available here, features workers from (at least for a West Virginian) an interesting choice of mine: Rosebud Mining.  (A perceptive former student, Ken Bannon, alerted me to the ad or I would have missed it.)  

People outside of West Virginia may not recall the chemical spill in January 2014 that contaminated the Elk River and left 300,000 West Virginians without drinking water.  As I noted in a post back then, the company that owned the chemical site was Freedom Industries, which listed as its sole owner, Chemstream Holdings, a company owned by J. Clifford Forrest.  Forrest also owns the Pennsylvania company (that also has Ohio operations) Rosebud Mining, which was located at the same address Chemstream Holdings listed for its headquarters. It appears that Portman has a solid lead in the race, and if I were part of the campaign, I'd probably not feature a mining company that had been linked (through an executive) to such a major recent environmental disaster.  

Despite the data (and the economic realities), claims of a war on coal continue. Even where there is some truth to the idea – recent regulations are not especially coal friendly — there are simply too many hurdles to overcome for coal employment numbers to go back to prior levels.  One can conceivably win a war on regulations, but technology and the marketplace are far less forgiving. It's time we embrace that reality.