Blaming the sinking coal industry on a few western states being “concerned about the impact of the fuel on climate change” is just the Trump administration’s idea of a nice way to say., “we don’t need the West Coast to ship coal, we’ll use Canada and Mexico to do the dirty work.”
Speaking at an Atlantic Council event in Washington on Friday, Brouillette said: “We hope to work more collaboratively with both Mexico and Canada to find export facilities to get the coal from Wyoming and other states in the U.S. West to Asia and other global markets.”
As usual, the Trump administration is deceptive, handing out two messages that are not consistent in their context. President Donald Trump campaigned to revive the ailing coal industry, even though the industry has declined faster during his administration than ever before due to falling natural gas prices.
Brouillette, on the other hand, told the gathering in Washington on Friday that coal will probably continue to decline as a fuel for U.S. power plants, but coal could provide the U.S. with rare Earth minerals needed in batteries to support renewable energy.
He also announced a $64 million Coal FIRST research initiative to develop smaller, cleaner coal power plants, but primarily as a technology to export, he said. This is not altogether a new initiative, though. It came up in 2018 when the DOE envisioned a “coal fleet of small units, sized 50 MW to 350 MW, with high efficiency and close-to-zero emissions,” something the industry should have done 20 years ago, according to Utility Dive.
Canada is interested in the idea
Interestingly, Brouillette didn’t talk with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about using USMCA to export coal, however, he said he met with Jason Kenney, the conservative premier of the Western Canadian province of Alberta, on Thursday, according to Reuters.
“We had a very wide-ranging and extensive conversation about that very topic. I think there is a lot of interest in doing this on the part of the Canadians,” he said. Kenney’s spokeswoman Christine Myatt said Canada’s “ports and rail are Constitutionally under federal authority, as is bilateral cross-border trade.”
Some U.S. lawmakers have complained about a lack of environmental standards in the USMCA. But Brouillette said, “Nonetheless it’s not going to prevent the administration from working with our colleagues in Canada and Mexico to look for those types of opportunities.”
As for Brouillette’s mention of getting rare Earth minerals from coal, this is nothing new, either. In 2017, the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) identified high concentrations of rare earth elements (REE) in coal samples collected from several American coal basins.
Coal samples were taken from the Illinois, Northern Appalachian, Central Appalachian, Rocky Mountain Coal Basins, and the Pennsylvania Anthracite region. The samples showed REEs at concentrations greater than 300 parts per million (ppm). The DOE established a research initiative focusing on DOE cost-shared research projects to design, develop, and test technology to actually recover REEs from coal-related materials in a variety of American coal basins. These projects began in October 2017.
This is where there are two sides to this story, and one side wants to increase exports of coal to help the coal industry. It is a political ploy the administration is trying to cover up by spouting the need for REEs and efficient, smaller coal-fired power plants.
It’s not all about sending the Coal FIRST technology to other countries, instead, it is about trying to revive a dirty, polluting fossil fuel to send to other countries instead of being a clean environment leader in the eyes of the world. I do hope that Canada and Mexico see through this bag of tricks the Trump administration is peddling and say “No,”
