April 3, 2026 - “You can’t just turn on the spigot,” says Jim Grech, chief executive of Peabody Energy, America’s biggest coal miner. Customers in Japan, Korea and Taiwan are pleading with Peabody for additional shipments, Grech says, so they can avoid energy shortages by switching more power generation to coal instead of natural gas..

While he says he’d love to help all the power plant operators in Asia looking to replace missing cargoes of liquefied natural gas trapped behind the Strait of Hormuz, Peabody is already running its mines in New South Wales, Australia at full tilt. “You need more crews, more equipment digging,” he says. “There’s no quick upturn in production.” A multi-year expansion is already underway at Wilpinjong Mine where it’s doubling production to 10 million tons per year by 2030. Peabody also produces 3.5 million tons a year at the Wambo mine JV with Glencore, and is ramping up its Centurion metallurgical coal mine. (Nearly all the Aussie coal is sold to power plants in Japan, India, Philippines, Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam.)

Northeast Asia had been reducing reliance on coal in favor of shipments of cleaner burning natural gas in recent years. But suddenly they are in the market for millions of more tons per year. “The world, as they run into energy security problems, turns back to coal,” says Grech, 59, who was named chairman of President Trump’s National Coal Council, in January. “There’s no other options.” Japan is moving to relax restrictions on coal generation; Taiwan is set to restart its Hsinta coal plant; Korea lifted anti-pollution caps; and India has ordered coal plants to hurry up and finish spring maintenance so they can be ready for a heavy load when the gas runs out. Even Europe is considering resurrecting mothballed plants.

With Qatar warning it might take years to get its LNG exports back to normal, traders have bid up coal prices by 20% in the past month to $150 a ton for Australia’s benchmark Newcastle export grade. How high could it go? “If this conflict continues longer than May, the stars could align for $200 a ton coal,” says Tony Knutson, head of thermal coal research at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. Even at that price, coal would still look cheap. Global LNG prices have doubled in a month to $20 per million British thermal units, which, says Knutson, is like paying $460 a ton for Newcastle coal.

“We don’t sell it out six months or a year. Most of the cargoes we have are unpriced. So as the prices go up our cargoes get higher revenue back to us,” says Grech. Grech thinks the Hormuz blockade “domino effect” will also spur domestic demand for Peabody’s landlocked Wyoming coal.

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St. Louis-based Peabody reported revenue of $3.8 billion and EBITDA of $455 million in 2025. This year, according to analyst Matthew Key at Texas Capital in Dallas, Peabody’s sales could rise to $4.6 billion or more, while EBITDA could jump to $870 million. Earnings per share are predicted to hit $2.39, up from a 46 cent loss last year. With the stock trading at $35.70, that’s a forward P/E of 15.

Not bad, but new investors already missed out on a huge 130% run up in Peabody shares in the past year, and 400% since Grech took over in June 2021. He previously served as CEO of Utah-based coal company Wolverine Fuels and as president of Nexus Gas Transmission. When he joined Peabody, it was still a giant operation but one that had been battered by a decade of competing against both green energy and shale gas, not to mention massive debts (since paid off). Peabody emerged from Chapter 11 in 2017 only to get whacked by Covid, which destroyed demand and drove shares down to new lows by late 2020.

Since arriving, Grech has focused on expanding high-profit metallurgical coal mining in Australia. He tried to buy coal mines from Anglo American in 2024 for $3.8 billion, but a fire at one of Anglo’s mines caused the deal to fall through.

For all its bad P.R., dirty old coal never went away. In fact, global coal consumption was a record 9 billion tons last year, according to the IEA. It’s the great culprit of global warming, admits Peabody in its SEC filings, and yet humans just keep using more of it. While China, which has lately been pushing into alternative energy production, still uses more than half of that total, U.S. coal combustion is down to just 500 million tons per year, half of what it was a decade ago, but up 13% last year thanks to Trump policies.

The shale gas revolution is the main reason behind coal’s decline. Fifteen years ago coal provided 47% of U.S. electricity; today it’s down to just 16%, only slightly more than wind and solar.

One asset underperforming its potential in Peabody’s portfolio is the North Antelope Rochelle mine in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming. America's biggest mine by tonnage, it’s an open-pit stripmine with towering bucket cranes scooping coal into literally mansion–sized dump trucks. Peabody produced about 80 million tons there last year, considerably lower than its 100 million ton rate a decade ago. But with fresh war-linked demand, that might change. Already pricing has ticked up to $15 per ton from $11.50 during Covid (this coal has lower energy content than the Newcastle benchmark) and profitability has risen to $2 per ton from less than $1.

There is currently no export path for Peabody’s Wyoming coal – it’s just too far away from existing coal export terminals to make economic sense. America exports about 40 million tons of coal a year, just a crumb in a 1 billion ton per year seaborne market (more than half of which is supplied by Indonesia). The biggest exporter is Core Natural Resources, which ships Pennsylvania and West Virginia coal out of Baltimore and James River, Virginia. Foresight Energy, founded by late billionaire Chris Cline (now owned by creditors of former owner Murray Energy) exports Illinois coal via the Mississippi River in Louisiana. Neither firm responded to multiple calls for comment.

Peabody, which now generates more than half its profits from Australia, has been trying for years to export Wyoming coal. More than a decade ago the anti-coal crowd blocked Peabody's attempt to build a $500 million coal export terminal in Seattle. It hopes to have better luck with a terminal plan pending for Oakland, California. (The developer has already won two lawsuits against the city). And there’s a $700 million port project in Guaymas, Mexico that would send out 30 million tons per year.

Grech takes a holistic approach to exports. The more other companies export, the better for Peabody, because it opens holes in the domestic market. Because the Powder River Basin mines can ramp up more economically than eastern underground mines, Peabody should be able to take some market share. “They can't just turn on the faucet either,” Grech says. The more they export, the more “that we can then backfill with our domestic production. So it's sort of a domino effect for us.” And the way electricity demand is surging, coal may be needed to power the new wave of AI datacenters. “We will need every option.”

Trump’s ally and coal advisor, Grech was naturally in favor of the January 2025 executive order declaring a national energy emergency, allowing the administration to bypass Congress and use Federal powers to keep coal plants operational. Some are pushing back: In March, Colorado’s attorney general sued to block a DOE extension of the lifespan of one unit at the Craig Generating Station, while the Sierra Club is suing to prevent coal extensions in Indiana.

A silver lining in the Powder River Basin is the possibility of identifying seams where other rare earth minerals are found alongside the coal. Peabody has so far extracted 800 ore samples and identified promising amounts of germanium and gallium, used in optics and electronics. It’s testing with the DOE, National Energy Technology Lab and the University of Wyoming to figure out how to extract and process the minerals. Says Grech: “It’s a real wild card.”

The longer the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the more energy policy makers will understand the value of coal as an emergency fuel source that’s easy to stockpile, says Grech. Whether it’s Iran, the Ukrainian war, Japan’s Fukushima disaster, every time there’s something in the world that upsets the supply demand balance, the world comes back to coal. “There's never been a war in my lifetime fought over coal. You never have the world saying, ‘We’re going to have an energy crisis because there’s a shortage of coal.’”