ASSOCIATED PRESS • October 4, 2025
U.S. officials in the coming days are set to hold the government’s biggest coal sales in more than a decade, offering 600 million tons from publicly owned reserves next to strip mines in Montana and Wyoming. The sales are a signature piece of President Donald Trump’s ambitions for companies to dig more coal from federal lands and burn it for electricity. Yet most power plants served by those mines plan to quit burning coal altogether within 10 years. Three other mines poised for expansions or new leases under Trump also face declining demand as power plants use less of their coal and in some cases shut down. Those market realities raise a fundamental question about the Republican administration’s push to revive a heavily polluting industry that long has been in decline: Who’s going to buy all that coal?