Trump Has Opened Public Land to Coal Mining. Not Many Are Interested.

The Trump administration’s attempt to revive a declining coal industry is running into yet another problem: Few want to mine for coal.

Coal industry players have spoken out against the Trump administration’s efforts to revive coal production, including its mandates for coal plants to stay open past their scheduled closure dates. Now, the administration is offering up millions of acres of public lands for mining, and companies aren’t bidding for them.

The Bureau of Land Management, the Interior Department agency that handles coal leasing, rescheduled a coal lease sale in Utah for the second time last week. The Trump administration in October rejected the only bid it received for more than 6 million tons of coal under two tracts of land in Utah. Statutory requirements say the Bureau of Land Management must reject bids that are below fair market value.

“The failed auctions are really an indicator that there’s not much appetite for new coal, or the appetite is at prices that are so low as to be not worthwhile for the government to even consider them, which is extraordinary given the pro coal policies of this administration,” Seth Feaster, an energy data analyst focused on the coal industry at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told NOTUS.

The bureau rescheduled a lease sale for one of the tracts in Utah for Feb. 6, according to a notice posted in a local news outlet, but canceled it. The bureau rescheduled the sale once again for Mar. 5, but canceled it the day before. The most recent cancellation was “at the applicant’s request,” according to a Bureau of Land Management spokesperson, who added that the agency “reserves the option to reoffer the lease at a later date.”

The spokesperson did not offer details about whether or when the agency would reoffer the tract.

The Bureau of Land Management scheduled the Utah sale after it received a request to do so from the Canyon Fuel Company, which operates the nearby Skyline Mine. NOTUS could not reach Canyon Fuel Company or its parent company, Wolverine Fuels, for comment.

The postponed Utah sale is the latest in a string of Trump administration attempts at expanding coal mining that have, at worst, received zero buy-in, and at best, failed to generate economically viable interest.

The Interior Department in September announced that the federal government would offer up 13.1 million acres of public land for new coal leases, far surpassing the 4-million-acre requirement outlined in Republicans’ budget law passed last year.

Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration decided to undo a Biden-era moratorium on new coal leasing in the Powder River Basin, an area in Montana and Wyoming that contains the largest coal reserves in the country.

Those moves were cheered by elected officials from coal-heavy regions and by the coal industry. But energy experts cast doubt on whether those sales would actually receive bids in an era when coal is fast losing its hold on the energy sector, and their outlook has proven true in several cases.

The federal government rejected the sole bid in an October lease sale for 167 million tons of coal near the Spring Creek Mine in Montana. The Navajo Transitional Electric Company, a tribally owned mining and energy generation company that owns the Spring Creek mine, offered less than a penny per ton for the coal, putting the bid at well below fair market value.

A spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management told NOTUS the federal government “rejected the winning bid … because it didn’t meet requirements of the Mineral Leasing Act,” but did not answer a question about whether the administration plans to reoffer the Montana sale.

Despite the outcome, the bureau cited the Montana lease sale as one of its “Trump administration accomplishments” in a year-end review in 2025.

After the Montana sale fell flat, the administration indefinitely postponed a sale that was slated for two days later near the West Antelope III mine in Wyoming. The spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management did not answer a question from NOTUS about when the bureau plans to schedule the sale, but said that it will publish a notice “when the sale is rescheduled.”

Future iterations of the sales in those states may not be much more successful, said Shiloh Hernandez, a senior attorney with Earthjustice’s Northern Rockies regional office who specializes in coal issues.

“The coal operators in the West have secured a lot of leases,” Hernandez told NOTUS. “They have enough leases to keep their existing mines operating for probably at least a decade. … To expand money past 10 years is a proposition that they don’t see any market value for.”

Coal leases in other parts of the country have been more successful — including one sale in Alabama across 14,000 acres, which generated more than $40 million. The Interior Department offered the land to the highest bidder.

That sale was for metallurgical coal, which underpins the American steelmaking industry and typically generates higher demand than thermal coal, which is primarily burned at power plants and has seen a drop-off in recent years amid higher reliance on natural gas and renewables, Feaster said.

In early September, sales at two mines in North Dakota also saw winning bids and generated more than a combined $100,000. Hernandez said that the market value for coal in North Dakota is typically lower than in other parts of the country, so the leasing process there allows for more flexibility.

There can be some “natural need” for new coal mining leases when mining companies use up small tracts of land, particularly in states outside the American West, Feaster said, but that does not mean the industry is making a comeback.

Coal industry backers say the slow restart to leasing will remedy itself as time goes on.

“It’s important to recognize that the prior administration actively worked through anti-coal policies to erode all confidence in the longevity of the coal industry, and so it’s no surprise that some of the initial sales reflected how challenging it has been for coal producers,” Ashley Burke, a spokesperson for the National Mining Association, told NOTUS. “But the fact that sales resumed is a first step to encourage future, long-term investments in America and in American coal.”

There’s been an overall decline in coal use by the power sector in the last decade.

The Bureau of Land Management spokesperson said in a statement to NOTUS that “as demand for reliable, dispatchable power grows, coal remains a critical component of ensuring affordable and dependable energy for the American people.”