Trump administration opens 13m acres for coal mines to support sector
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The news: The Trump administration on Monday announced plans to open 13.1million acres of federal land for leasing to coal miners to support the flagging industry.
The numbers: The Department of Energy (DPE) also announced it would provide USD625 million ($951.5 million) for power plants that burn the fuel as part of the initiative.
The context: The Department of the Interior said on Monday that the expanded leasing will triple the benchmarks set by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and deliver on the President’s directive to restore American Energy Dominance, securing US supply chains and reliable energy.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum signed the policy initiative during a Department of the Interior event focused on advancing Trump’s ‘Beautiful Clean Coal’ mandate. The agency also said it would reduce the royalty rate paid for coal and would be streamlining approvals for projects in Wyoming, Tennessee and other states.
The DPE said that its USD625 million in funding would be used to recommission or modernise coal plants and funds for new coal projects.
What they said: Speaking at the event, chief of the US Environmental Protection Agency Lee Zeldin said: “At the EPA, we're going to protect the environment and grow the economy. We're going to reject the notion this is a binary choice between the two. We're going to reject the idea, in order to protect the government, you have to strangulate the entire sectors of our economy out of existence and over the course of one year, we will do more deregulation at EPA than the entire federal governments have done across all federal agencies, across the entire presidencies.”
The sources: US Department of the Interior, Bloomberg, Reuters
