Donald Trump's election has thrown an apparent lifeline to beleaguered coal producers but he may not be able to do much to revive the fortunes of the industry, according to commentary published yesterday by Reuters. The U.S. coal industry has been a victim of the shale revolution and the enormous quantities of cheap gas that have been unleashed by hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. There is not much that a future Trump administration can do to protect coal producers, who have mostly been the victim of economic forces rather than politics and the Obama administration's "war on coal.” U.S. coal production has fallen by almost a quarter from 1,171 million short tons in 2008 to just 897 million short tons in 2015, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
