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August 12, 2026 - The story of coal in Pennsylvania over the past few decades has been one of decline.
Over the years, the coal industry has shed jobs, power plants have shuttered in the face of competition with cheaper natural gas, and regulations have targeted the air and water pollution that emanated from smokestacks and mines.
But some see this moment of rapidly growing energy demand and desire for reliable, domestic energy as an opportunity to revitalize coal’s image.
Canonsburg-based Core Natural Resources, which formed from a merger of Consol Energy and Arch Resources, is years into a campaign called The Coal Hard Truth.
“The main idea is to educate our policymakers, the average everyday public decision makers in government roles, but also in industrial roles, corporate leaders, basically about the fact that coal is nowhere near dead,” said Matthew Mackowiak, Core’s government affairs director.
Mackowiak said the coal facts highlighted on the campaign website come from primary sources such as the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the International Energy Agency, and the United Nations.
The list of sources also references coal industry groups, Libertarian think tanks and an author who has argued climate change is not a serious threat.
Future uses The website emphasizes coal’s role in the past as the feedstock that enabled steelmaking and helped bring electricity to the country, as well as future-looking applications in batteries and as carbon-foam molds for making aerospace components.
Core was chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy this summer for a multi-million-dollar grant award for a pilot project to determine the viability of extracting critical minerals from coal. Critical minerals are a class of materials that are crucial for making items from cell phones to electric vehicle batteries to national defense systems.
Critical minerals mining is concentrated in just a few countries, including Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and most processing happens in China, according to the World Resources Institute.
“We're very excited to see that award come through,” Mackowiak said. “It highlights not only this administration, but I think the nation as a whole's conviction that we need to start producing these materials domestically.”
Curt Coccodrilli, acting assistant secretary for DOE’s Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office, said the Core pilot will help the U.S. compete with China.
“They have a long game. It's to get to 90% across the supply chain to thwart all of their competitors, and the U.S. being number one,” Coccodrilli said. “So, it's our goal to unwind that and get those supply chains back here in the U.S. where we perfected them.”
“I think as these technologies move along, you will see a brighter future for coal,” Coccodrilli said.
Mackowiak said the coal industry provides good wages that help support the southwestern Pennsylvania region’s economy. The average miner earns about $110,000 annually, and other roles are needed, from service workers to engineers.
Traditional coal jobs are harder to come by in recent years. Reports done on behalf of coal groups found the number of direct and indirect jobs created by the coal industry in Pennsylvania stood at 41,500 in 2010, but fell to 11,547 by 2024.
‘Reliable source of power’
Even with futuristic uses for coal, Core and the Trump administration still see a strong role for coal in electricity generation, especially as more power is demanded by hyperscale data centers used to develop artificial intelligence.
“There's really nothing else that can quickly meet that demand like coal as far as being a baseload, reliable source of power,” Mackowiak said.
Coal supporters argue that the fuel is more reliable than other sources because it can be stored on site at power plants and is not weather dependent.
Akshaya Jha, an Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, said one answer to dependability issues is to put a value on reliability that’s not specific to the source, but to the benefit it provides consumers.
“Coal has an advantage when the system needs sustained generation over long periods, while batteries can be particularly effective for shorter-duration needs and grid-stability services because they can respond extremely quickly,” Jha said.
Coal once provided more than half of the electricity generated in Pennsylvania. That share started to drop with the natural gas boom and today has fallen to about 5%, according to federal statistics.
Coccodrilli said the demand for coal is stabilizing after previous declines. He considered the outlook for the fuel to be “rosy,” especially given global demand. The IEA said coal demand grew less than half of a percent between 2024 and 2025, which it called modest.
In the U.S., data centers are somewhat changing the economic calculus around coal-fired power plants, Jha said. This April, Gov. Josh Shapiro petitioned a court to extend the retirement dates for two coal plants by four years. The Keystone and Conemaugh plants were set to shut down in 2028.
“It is fair to say that rising demand has led to a scenario where retirements of some coal plants have been delayed due to economic conditions,” Jha said. “But we still expect those coal plants to retire at some point, and we don't expect new coal plants to be built in their place.”
He said, long-term, people still need to consider how coal could compete against cheaper gas and renewables, and the environmental outlook. A future presidential administration could reassert the environmental regulations that this administration has railed against.
If it is profitable to extract critical minerals from coal or its waste, that industry could scale up, but Jha said it would likely be smaller than the market for power generation.
A longer horizon
On the emissions that come from burning coal, which contribute to climate change and negatively affect human health, Coccodrilli said coal plants have had to turn to “ingenious research and development techniques” to minimize pollution and be in compliance with regulations.
“A lot of that is driven in part by our national labs and our lab network on how to get better emissions coming out of those smokestacks,” he said, adding that researchers work every day to make boilers and coal reactors more efficient.
There is not one uniform picture for coal, even in the U.S., said Seth Blumsack, a professor of energy and environmental economics and international affairs at Penn State.
“These decisions about which fuels to use for power generation in Pennsylvania and other states that have really embraced competition, these are really going to be driven by market signals,” Blumsack said. “And right now the market signals are really pointing toward natural gas.”
While the majority of the nation’s coal goes to power generation, the portion used for steel- and cement-making is still very much needed, Blumsack said, as substitutes aren’t readily available.
Aside from market signals, Blumsack said the economics of coal are also driven by politics.
“A couple of years ago, you could very much see the end of coal as a power generation source in Pennsylvania really on the horizon,” Blumsack said. “Which, just given Pennsylvania's history, is fairly dramatic.”
He said that horizon could now be extended by several years.
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