https://www.bloombergquint.com/
(Bloomberg Opinion) — From the Rocky Mountains to the Rhineland and Australia’s Great Dividing Range, the great tide of the coal industry is receding.
The entire Powder River Basin, the region spanning the states of Montana and Wyoming that provides about half of America’s thermal coal, is “distressed,” Moody’s Investors Service wrote in a report last week.
All companies producing coal there are now focusing on mining coking coal elsewhere in the U.S., the ratings company wrote. Output “will likely fall significantly in 2020,” it said.
Energy Information Administration forecasts quoted by Moody’s suggest that production from the Powder River-dominated Western Region will drop to 339 million short tons in 2020 from 418 million short tons in 2018, a 19% reduction and a 42% decline from 592 million short tons in 2010.
Most of that decline happened while coal could still produce electricity more cheaply than renewable alternatives, a situation that’s now reversed. A comparable drop over the coming decade would shutter almost every mine in the basin.
For the rest of this opinion column: https://www.bloombergquint.com/gadfly/coal-is-in-retreat-worldwide-as-renewable-energy-costs-drop