{"id":113319,"date":"2025-11-02T01:49:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T01:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/113319\/"},"modified":"2025-11-02T01:49:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T01:49:07","slug":"its-not-just-soybeans-china-also-stopped-importing-u-s-coal-amid-trumps-trade-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/113319\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s not just soybeans. China also stopped importing U.S. coal amid Trump’s trade war"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump\u2019s efforts to help the U.S. coal industry at home are being undermined by falling sales abroad amid\u00a0his trade war<\/a>\u00a0with China, new government reports show.<\/p>\n

China has stopped importing U.S. coal, accounting for most of a 14% decline in U.S. coal exports so far this year, according to analysts and the U.S. Energy Information Administration.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s meeting<\/a>\u00a0with Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week suggests trade progress. But whether it will include the U.S. coal industry is still uncertain.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s hard to tell whether that\u2019s just going to maintain the status quo or if that\u2019s going to be an increase in exports of coal and soybeans to China,\u201d coal analyst Seth Feaster with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said Friday.<\/p>\n

Trump has been easing up on regulations and\u00a0opening up mining<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0federal lands<\/a>. The result has been to \u201ckeep our lights on, our economy strong, and America Energy Dominant,\u201d Interior Department spokesperson Charlotte Taylor said in an e-mailed statement Friday.<\/p>\n

The administration has also reduced royalty rates for coal extracted from federal lands and in September pledged $625 million to bolster coal power generation, including by recommissioning or modernizing old coal plants amid growing electricity demand from artificial intelligence and data centers.<\/p>\n

Recent government coal lease sales in Montana, Wyoming and Utah, however, have\u00a0failed to draw bids<\/a>\u00a0deemed acceptable by the Interior Department.<\/p>\n

So far this year, U.S. coal production is up about 6%, due not to Trump policies but higher natural gas prices, Feaster said.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, coal exports fell 14% from January through September compared to the same time last year, according to an\u00a0EIA report released Oct. 7.<\/a><\/p>\n

The drop followed an additional Chinese tariff of 15% on U.S. coal in February and a 34% reciprocal Chinese tariff on imports from the U.S. in April, the EIA said\u00a0in a report issued Friday.<\/a><\/p>\n

The U.S. exports about one-fifth of the coal it produces. Most goes to India, the Netherlands, Japan, Brazil and South Korea.<\/p>\n

China is not a top destination, taking in only about one-tenth of U.S. coal exports. But it has had an outsized effect on overall U.S. coal exports by halting all coal from the U.S. since April, said Andy Blumenfeld, a coal analyst at McCloskey by OPIS.<\/p>\n

Almost three-quarters of U.S. coal exported to China last year was metallurgical coal used in steelmaking. The rest was thermal coal burned in power plants to produce electricity, according to Blumenfeld.<\/p>\n

Nearly all U.S. metallurgical coal is mined in Appalachia, while the bulk of U.S. thermal coal comes from massive, open-pit mines in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana.<\/p>\n

Appalachia would therefore benefit most from a resumption of U.S. coal exports to China, noted Blumenfeld by email.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is optimism,\u201d Blumenfeld wrote. \u201cBut there is little documentation to back that up right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most coal headed for China last year went through Baltimore, with lesser amounts via the Norfolk, Virginia, area and Gulf of Mexico, according to Blumenfeld.<\/p>\n

Relatively little thermal coal from the Western U.S. is exported due to the cost of hauling it by rail to the West Coast, where there has also been political resistance to building port facilities to export more coal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump\u2019s efforts to help the U.S. coal industry at home are being undermined by falling sales…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113320,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,607,4888,65,219,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-113319","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-china","10":"tag-coal","11":"tag-donald-trump","12":"tag-economy","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113319\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}