Trump Exempts Over 100 Facilities from Biden Climate Rules
The Trump administration is exempting over 100 chemical manufacturing plants, oil refineries, coal plants, medical device sterilizers, and other companies from Clean Air Act rules set by the Biden administration, recognizing that “overly restrictive environmental regulations undermine America’s energy reliability, economic vitality, and national security.” The Trump administration issued four proclamations exempting the facilities from one of four rules for two years. The plan is that by the time the two-year exemptions expire, the rules in question may be removed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). According to the White House, “The exemptions ensure that these facilities within these critical industries can continue to operate uninterrupted to support national security without incurring substantial costs to comply with, in some cases, unattainable compliance requirements.” Even the Biden administration had noted the disruption the rules would cause when it previously said it would consider exempting facilities from a rule to prevent disruptions to supply chains for medical devices.
Due to one of the proclamations, more than 50 chemical manufacturers and oil refineries are exempt from requirements to reduce emissions of certain chemicals, including ethylene oxide and chloroprene. Eight producers of taconite iron ore, used in making steel, are exempt from requirements to reduce mercury emissions by about 33%. These plants are needed in the production of semiconductors and energy. Six coal plants are also exempt from the more stringent restrictions on emissions of mercury, nickel, arsenic, and lead set by the Biden administration, joining 66 other coal plants previously exempted.
On May 7, 2024, Biden’s EPA published a final rule, titled National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants: Coal- and Oil-Fired Electric Utility Steam Generating Units Review of the Residual Risk and Technology Review, which amended the preexisting Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule set by the Obama administration to make it more stringent. The Biden rule’s compliance date is July 8, 2027, three years after the rule’s effective date of July 8, 2024. Because the rule requires compliance with standards based on emissions-control technologies that do not yet exist in a commercially viable form, President Trump issued the proclamation for coal plants that allows the exemptions.
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NIOSH Black Lung Mobile Unit Returns After Federal Cuts; WV Screenings Scheduled in NCWV Next Week
A mobile unit that provides free black lung screenings to coal miners is up and running again this month after federal cuts led to the service’s pause earlier this year, according to a news release from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The mobile testing unit — run by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health — will be offering screenings in Morgantown next week and in Marion County on Aug. 5. An additional screening event will be held in nearby Maryland on Aug. 27.
The NIOSH mobile testing vehicle.
Photo: NIOSH
Details for the visits are as follows:
8 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. from Tuesday, July 29 to Thursday, July 31 at the National Mine Rescue Association’s Post 5 Mine Rescue Contest at Mylan Park (500 Mylan Park Lane, Morgantown, WV 26501)
8 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 5 at the Price Cutter in Mannington (1 Rainbow Plaza, Mannington, WV 26582)
8 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. on Aug. 27 at the Grantsville (Maryland) Volunteer Fire Department (178 Springs Road, Grantsville, MD 21536)
While appointments are recommended, they’re not required.
All coal miners — current and former, and from any part of a mine — are encouraged to take advantage of the free health assessments, which include a black lung screening as well as tests to analyze general lung health. All reports and screenings are confidential.
Assessments will take about 30 minutes per a person and include a work history and respiratory questionnaire, a chest X-ray, a blood pressure screening and a spirometry breathing test.
Those who participate in the screenings should receive results in eight to 10 weeks, per the release.
These screenings are crucial to helping with the early detection of black lung disease. Earlier detection of black lung allows miners to practice better mitigation, which can help slow the disease from progressing into more complicated and debilitating forms.
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AI Without Coal? That Won’t Work
By Frank Clemente and Fred Palmer; Coal is the Cornerstone LLC.
Note: This is Part 2 of a piece describing how natural gas has demonstrated limitations and coal-based electricity will be necessary for the AI revolution to proceed at scale.
Data center developers cavalierly relying on natural gas generation (almost all of them) would be wise to remember four key concepts in power system planning: (1) Reliability, (2) Availability, (3) Accessibility and (4) Affordability. All these are part of an overriding rule that has guided utility commissions for decades – Prudence. This once widely accepted doctrine dismisses decisions based on chronologically constrained data, untested hypotheses, and wishful thinking and strives to base policies on caution, probability, experience and empirical reality. In many states, prudence has clearly fallen by the wayside and monolithic dependence is emerging. In Texas, for example, 91% of proposed data centers would rely on natural gas (NG) generation. Numerous other states are following the same narrow path. Solar and wind are intermittent and of diminished utility to 24/7 data centers. Nuclear is prohibitively expensive and remains a fuel of the “future”. And the DOE recently admitted: “China has a major role at each stage of the global battery supply chain and dominates interregional trade of minerals”. The United States has at least 23% of the world’s coal.
Fred Palmer
In Part One we described how Pennsylvania is moving toward a power supply system that will decrease reliability and make electricity more expensive. In July, politicians, energy suppliers and technology experts convened in Pittsburgh and announced $92 billion in commitments to a vast array of data centers and NG power plants to support Artificial Intelligence. Meanwhile, there are plans in Pennsylvania to close all coal plants. Ironically, a day after our article was published, MorningStar Analytics, the official designated watchdog of the PJM Interconnection, warned: “There is simply no new capacity to meet new loads.” Nevertheless, Maryland and New Jersey have also taken steps to eliminate coal and significantly reduce baseload capacity. All this despite Joseph Stanek, the PJM Director of Government Services, stating that the majority of coal plant closures have been for political reasons, not for economics.
But Pennsylvania is only a microcosm of what is happening throughout the US. In just a little more than a decade, over 300 coal power plants have been closed, many prematurely. Coal production has been cut in half and coal’s share of electricity generation has declined from 45% to 16%. These declines are taking place in the context of what will surely be an unprecedented increase in electricity demand over the next two decades. The US Energy Information Administration projects power generation will increase from about 4,175 Terawatt Hours (TWh) in 2025 to over 5,600 TWh in 2044. This rise of over 1,400 TWh in the next 20 years is more than six times the growth over the 20-year period 2004 to 2023. To give a further idea of scale, this increase alone exceeds the current electricity generation of Germany, France and the UK combined.
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A Rational Energy Path Forward Must Include Coal
As noted by numerous experts in the past, the U.S. can ill-afford to totally move away from natural gas, especially with the surging demand for power generation. And now comes the news that, in fact, more coal is expected to be used in the coming year — a move that is good for not only the U.S. but West Virginia.
According to the latest “Short-Term Energy Outlook” from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), coal consumption is projected to rise by 6% in 2025 — the first such increase in years.
The reason is simple: rising electricity demand and increasing natural gas prices have made coal a more cost-competitive option once again.
In the first quarter of 2025 alone, coal-fired power plants — which account for over 90% of U.S. coal use — burned 18% more coal than during the same period in 2024. Coal’s share of national electricity generation is expected to climb from 16% to 17% next year.
This is not a step backward. It’s a pragmatic and responsible move to meet America’s growing power needs while keeping the lights on and the economy humming.
West Virginia, as the second-largest coal-producing state and home to nine active coal-fired power plants, stands to benefit from this temporary resurgence. Coal not only fuels our homes and industries, it fuels local jobs, community investment, and vital tax revenue.
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The AI Power Surge is Here and Coal is Essential to Meeting It
Big tech’s scramble to deploy ever-larger data centers to serve AI has become the electricity elephant in the room. Across the country, power demand is soaring, and data centers with the energy needs of entire cities – and even states – are driving the surge.
Meeting this new demand will require new generation but also getting more power from the capacity already on the grid. Electricity markets are sending unmistakable signals that the era of early coal plant retirements is now long gone.
The Scale of the Challenge
At a recent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission conference on grid reliability, Manu Asthana, PJM’s CEO, said, “AI is going to change our world. In our forecast between 2024 and 2030, currently we have a 32-gigawatt (GW) increase in demand, of which 30 is from data centers.” That increase is equivalent to adding 20 million new homes to the grid in the next five years.
ICF International, a leading energy consultancy, expects national power demand to jump a stunning 25% by 2030 and nearly 80% by 2050. If that seems farfetched, consider Meta’s newly announced data centers.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, says the company will construct multiple data centers nearly the size of Manhattan. The first, called Prometheus, is expected to come online in 2026. These data centers are going to be able to scale up to 5 GW. As Jesse Jenkins, a leading energy researcher at Princeton, observed, a data center of that scale will use the same amount of power as the entire state of Nevada or Kansas.
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