The Trump-Pence campaign has adopted a common West Virginia criticism of U.S. energy policy under the Obama administration that is known as the "war on coal." This phrase is used to describe the current administration's support for U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (via the proposed Clean Power Plan) and other environmental protections that relate to consumption of fossil fuels, especially coal.  In the vice presidential debate Republican Mike Pence repeated the phrase several times, asserting that the EPA was killing coal jobs, especially in places like West Virginia and Kentucky.  The problem is that regardless of the EPA's goals, it is not environmental regulation that is coal's main challenge.  It is price. 

As Charlie Patton, president of West Virginia-based Appalachian Power explained, "Forget the clean power plan. You cannot build a coal plant that meets existing regulation today that can compete with $5 gas. It just cannot happen."  Cheap natural gas, made available by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in shale formations, has led to a significant increase in natural gas-fired electric power generation, most of which replaced coal as the fuel of choice. The shale gas boom, which started approximately in 2008, can account for most of this change.  Here's the U.S. electricity generation data by fuel (my chart using Energy Information Administration data) for 2006 to 2015):  

U.S. Electricity Generation, by fuel

Note the drop in coal begins modestly in 2008 and drops from 48.21% to 33.18% in 2015. In that time frame, coal lost 15.03% of the market, while natural gas increased 11.23%.  Renewable sources (not including solar and hydropower) increased 3.61% to 6.65% overall. That means that natural gas and renewables picked up 14.84% of the market — or 98.7% of the market lost by coal. 

Coal production in my home state of West Virginia has declined from the peak of 158 million short tons in 2008 down to 95 million in 2015, with further decline expected for 2016.  And the state is feeling the devastating effect of lost jobs — West Virginia was the only state in 2015-16 to lose a statistically significant number of jobs.  Tax revenues are down dramatically, and that decline, too, is expected to continue.  The harm to the state of these lost jobs is real, but there is no reasonable governmental policy that could change this decline, even if we wanted it to.  The reality is that natural gas is a cheaper option, it has long-term potential to work alongside renewables, and no energy proposal from any major candidate has suggested a proposal that would help coal take back marketshare from natural gas (despite promises to simply bring back coal jobs).  

Living in West Virginia, a place I love to live, it is easy to want hope.  We need hope, and we need a plan, but that plan has to include educating our workforce and expanding economic opportunities in other industries, not harkening back to another time that will never return. The reality is that the war on coal is not one that can be won. In the end, as a pricing problem, trying to win the war on coal is really trying to win a war on math.  It just can't happen. The numbers don't add up.