CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The president of the West Virginia Coal Association is “hopeful” President-Elect Donald Trump can help save the coal industry.
“The fellow sitting in the White House can make a big, big difference,” Bill Raney said on MetroNews “Talkline.” “He’s talked about putting coal miners back to work and that’s certainly emblematic of what we need to do.”
Raney said Trump has reassured a lot of West Virginia miners he can expand plants, keep mines open and build new ones just by having “a positive attitude about the coal industry.”
Policies of the Obama administration, Raney said, has driven the electric utility industry away from coal.
“This administration is, what it’s done is just hung a negative cloud over the coal industry and when that happens, then they go where it’s less controversial, so they go to gas. It’s cheap. There’s no question about it — it’s cheap,” he said.
Currently, Raney said the market has some “bright spots” in it, but will never be the same compared to 10 years ago.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to 160 million tons,” he said of what coal companies produced back in 2006. “We’ll probably be fortunate to get 80 million this year. Hopefully, it’ll pick up these last six weeks of the year.”
Trump first promised to put coal miners back to work during a Charleston rally in May. After he was elected Nov. 8, he called Governor-Elect Jim Justice and told him he remained committed to that promise.
“President-elect Trump made it clear that he won’t forget about West Virginia when it comes to our nation’s energy policies,” Justice said in a news release.
Raney said coal miners who attended the Trump rally were there because they wanted to see a change. He said giving these miners their jobs back isn’t too much of an expectation.
“There was such a hope amongst it all,” he said. “It just had a real good feel about it and I think people are searching for that.”
Trump, a Republican, got about 69 percent of the vote in West Virginia over Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 27 percent during the General Election.