It’s a big win for the natural gas industry that analysts say is the real culprit behind the death of coal.
The Trump administration pledged to bring the struggling coal industry roaring back by eliminating environmental regulations, shrugging off renewable energy and boosting fuel exports to China, which nosedived in 2012.
But on Thursday, the White House announced a new trade deal with China to bolster the natural gas industry that analysts say starved coal into a slow death by devouring the U. S. electricity market it once dominated.
Under the deal, Chinese companies can begin buying liquid natural gas directly from producers in the U. S., fanning the embers of an export industry that began to heat up earlier this year. China’s cities are infamously choked by smog from years of burning coal at a breakneck pace to feed its ravenous appetite for electricity and new factories. Now, as the country moves aggressively to slash its carbon footprint, cleaner-burning natural gas has become an attractive alternative fuel.
That’s bad news for coal. In the U. S., domestic coal use plummeted over the past decade as natural gas, made cheap by the so-called fracking revolution, supplanted coal as the chief source of fuel for the utility industry. Until 2012, Chinese demand buoyed the industry, even as then-President Barack Obama increased environmental regulations that favored zero-emissions sources such as solar and wind over coal, by far the dirtiest fossil fuel.
But that year, exports to China went into a tailspin, and the U. S.
