Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced on Monday that the department will open 13.1 million acres of federal land for coal leasing as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to support and expand the coal industry.
“Everybody likes to say, ‘Drill baby, drill.’ I know that President Trump has another initiative for us, which is ‘Mine baby, mine,'” Burgum said at an event.
Burgum said expanding coal development is essential to achieving “energy dominance.” Energy demand is rising quickly, largely due to the growth of artificial intelligence and data centers.
Simultaneously, the Department of Energy announced it would spend $625 million on recommissioning or modernizing coal power units, as well as on other efforts to aid coal plants.
The Trump administration has pushed a strategy of increasing fossil fuel production to meet energy needs while slowing the growth of renewable energy sources.
As part of the announcement, the Interior Department will reduce the royalty rates for coal production from 12.5% to 7%, lowering the per-ton cost of mining coal. Burgum said the department is also working to streamline coal lease approvals.
“We are taking things in the Interior that used to take years and now getting it down to months and even weeks,” Burgum said. “Part of the announcements today are seven different lease applications across Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, and Alabama. Those are all in the process of being completed.”
Burgum said the leases were initiated after the July 4 signing of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The law requires the Interior Department to open at least 4 million acres of public lands for coal leasing and streamline the review process for coal leases.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement that the new funding “will help keep our nation’s coal plants operating and will be vital to keeping electricity prices low and the lights on without interruption. Coal built the greatest industrial engine the world has ever known, and with President Trump’s leadership, it will help do so again.”
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said at the same event that the EPA will provide additional compliance time for stream electric power generation to meet the 2024 Effluent Limitations Guidelines, which are meant to reduce pollution.
Through a proposed rule and a direct final rule, the EPA is extending seven compliance deadlines, including those for eliminating discharges of wastewater from flue gas scrubbers, bottom ash transport, and coal combustion residuals. The EPA said the proposal will save $200 million annually in electricity costs that are placed on consumers.
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Zeldin also announced that the EPA will publish an advance notice of proposed rulemaking to gather public input on possible changes to how the Clean Air Act’s Regional Haze Rule is implemented.
“We’re going to reject the idea, in order to protect the environment, you have to strangulate entire sectors of our economy out of existence and over the course of one year, we will do more deregulation at EPA than the entire federal governments have done across all federal agencies, across the entire presidencies when you look back at history,” Zeldin said.
