Energy Blog: Coal’s Brightest Future May Not Be as a Fuel

The big budget bill signed by President Trump on July 4 left many observers with a strong dose of déjà vu, especially with its support for the coal mining industry. The bill opened some 4 million acres of public lands to coal leasing and reduced the royalty paid by mining companies to the government for coal produced on Federal lands. It also aims to support coal mining indirectly by propping up the coal power industry—the biggest customer for coal—through erecting roadblocks to the fossil-fuel energy industry’s emerging competition, wind and solar power facilities.
 
What makes this all familiar isn’t the exact particulars, but the general idea that the Federal government needs to help develop and support markets for coal.
 
In 1973, for instance, in the shadow of the OPEC oil embargo, the Nixon Administration launched Project Independence with strong yet ultimately unfulfilled rhetoric of achieving energy self-sufficiency by 1980. Direct combustion of coal in place of oil in the power sector along with expensive gasification and liquefaction programs to convert coal into synthetic petroleum and gas were key to that.
 
Dependence on imported oil continued unabated. But President Carter continued the track by forming the Synthetic Fuels Corporation in 1980 with a $20 billion budget and grand ambition to make alternative fuels from coal. The program was abolished in 1986 (during the Reagan Administration) after having spent less than $1 billion of its original budget.

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Fast forward to the 2000s, and the George W. Bush Administration launched its own signature coal program, called FutureGen. Introduced in 2003, FutureGen was intended to promote the future of the coal industry by building a demonstration power plant that would gasify and combust domestic coal to produce electricity and hydrogen; the plant would be equipped with carbon capture and sequestration systems such that it could operate without releasing greenhouse gas emissions. After five years and the selection of a construction site in Illinois, the Bush Administration’s Department of Energy pulled funding in 2008, citing high costs.
 
The Obama Administration revived the program in 2010. FutureGen 2.0 relied on a different technology (oxy-combustion instead of gasification), but had the same ambition: finding a way to use coal but without all the emissions. Obama killed the troubled program in 2016.
 
So, why the bipartisan obsession with multi-billion dollar initiatives that try to find a lifeline for coal in the power sector or as an alternative to petroleum in transportation?
In the aftermath of the 1970s oil crises or during the War on Terror era of the early 2000s, petroleum imports were not only high, but were also reliant on geopolitically unstable parts of the world. Coal was considered the one energy resource that was affordable and available in the United States and thus would not compromise our national security.
 
Indeed, the United States has more coal reserves than any other country, so its domestic abundance is alluring.
 
But what does this tortured history of trying to find new uses for coal mean for President Trump, who pledged to save coal during his first Administration (he didn’t) and now, working with Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, is dedicated to reinvigorating “America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry”?
 
For one thing, it seems to be missing the history of the last 20 years in the U.S. electric generation industry, where coal use has plummeted more than 60 percent as wind and solar capacity soared, their prices fell, and hydraulic fracturing unleashed great volumes of domestic gas from shale formations. With coal power being squeezed by wind and solar on the one hand and gas on the other, it seems unwise to pin the recovery of the coal mining industry on increasing the amount of coal being burned for fuel.

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Instead, the Trump Administration should promote using it as a building block for valuable materials. In fact, there are signs this shift may be starting.
 
To be sure, various statements by the Department of Energy and Secretary Wright play up the uses of coal in the energy industry, sometimes in all capital letters. This emphasis on promoting coal for the power sector looks silly given all the failed efforts since the 1970s and the technological transformations of the past 20 years.
 
But the rest of the various stated policy goals, which focus on coal’s role in steel-making and as a potential source of critical materials gives a smarter preview of what the future of coal in America actually might be: a building block to make other things. For instance, one of the coal-supporting measures in this month’s budget bill adds metallurgical coal, used in the steel-making process, to a list of critical minerals eligible for a production credit, equal to 2.5 percent of costs.
 
That’s a step in the right direction. Instead of burning coal, which is dirty and unnecessary given all the other cleaner ways to make electricity or heat these days, we should use it to make stuff.
 
Fossil fuels are only “fuels” when they are burned. But about 5 to 10 percent of fossil fuels—oil, gas, and coal—globally are not combusted; they are used to fabricate valuable products such as agrochemicals, plastics, fertilizers, shampoos, perfumes, and many other household items. Coal is part of that story, as it has been used for steel production and making coal tar—an ingredient in chemicals and pharmaceuticals—for well over a century. And that is the right idea for coal’s future moving forward: coal-based products.
 
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Coal is already an ingredient for activated carbon in water and air filters and to make graphene or graphite. Looking forward there are far more applications, including fibers for novel fabrics, 3D printing materials, insulating foams, and structural building materials such as pavers, bricks, decking, siding, and roofing shingles. Some of those materials, namely coal bricks and coal blacktops, are cheaper and cleaner than similar ones made from petroleum. There are even proposals to make computer memory devices or entire houses from coal. 
 
Oddly enough, some of the most valuable materials in coal aren’t even carbon-based. The many billions of tons of coal we have burned over the last 150 years have left a legacy of hundreds of millions of tons of ash. Often, that ash is handled as a potentially toxic waste product that is retained in ponds and carted to landfills. But that ash can be incorporated into cement and drywall as a building materials, and the ash ponds and piles often contain significant volumes of rare earth elements and useful minerals.

In 2024, I wrote in Mechanical Engineering magazine about how global oil demand remained steady while worldwide gasoline consumption had started to decline. A big driver for that was the use of waxes, tars, lubricants, and naphthas from petroleum as feedstock for making chemicals. In that column, I concluded, “We will probably look back with curiosity on taking something as precious and versatile as petroleum and burning it up.”
 
The same might well be true for coal. Ultimately, if we can move the black rock’s identity from fossil fuel to fossil feedstock, not only could it reduce carbon emissions to the atmosphere, but it could be an economic lifeline for coal-mining regions while reinforcing domestic supply chains for useful materials.
 
Michael E. Webber is the Sid Richardson Chair in Public Affairs, John J. McKetta Centennial Energy Chair in Engineering, and engineering academic director of the KBH Energy Center at the University of Texas at Austin.