Top US Coal Miner Peabody Sees Booming Demand in Trump Era

The Peabody Energy Corp. Somerville Central coal mine in Oakland City, Indiana, US.

(Bloomberg) -- Swelling US demand for electricity has the potential to boost coal consumption as much as 57%, according to mining giant Peabody Energy Corp., in what would be a major shift for an industry that’s been waning for years.

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With the US seeking to meet skyrocketing demand and the Trump administration pushing to prop up the coal industry, Peabody expects utilities to ramp up output from coal plants that are running well below full speed, the company said in an investor presentation on Wednesday. Boosting usage to “historic capacity factors” could lead to more than 250 million tons of additional annual demand in the coming years, it said.

Still, analysts see this forecast as a mathematical maximum that’s unlikely to be achieved in the real world.

US coal usage has been steadily declining as utilities shift away from the dirtiest fossil fuel. But President Donald Trump’s pro-coal and anti-renewable approach has included blocking plans to shut down this from a Michigan power plant that burns fuel from Peabody. Total consumption is expected to be 439 million tons this year, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That’s up 6.7% from last year, but well down from its 2007 peak of 1.13 billion tons.

“Peabody sees great untapped potential for existing US coal plants,” Mark Spurbeck, chief financial officer for the St. Louis-based company, said by email.

Electricity demand in the US is set to climb 25% through 2030, driven by factories, increasingly electrified homes and especially from the booming buildout of data centers used for artificial intelligence. At the same time, supply-chain constraints have hindered utilities’ efforts to add more natural gas plants.

That’s spurring increased reliance on underused coal plants, which have significant potential to deliver more power.

The US fleet was operating at just 42% last year, according to Peabody, compared to 72% in 2008.

Still, anticipating demand to climb by 250 million tons assumes that coal plants are all ramped up close to the historic levels that preceded the global financial crisis of 2008, which is unlikely, said Andy Blumenfeld, director of data analytics at McCloskey by Opis.

“That’s a really big number,” he said. “It’s a theoretical maximum, if everything works perfectly. And they don’t.”

Story continues

(Updates with detail on Peabody customer in fourth paragraph. A source corrected data in eighth paragraph of a previous version of this story.)

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