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California, United States – Margaret Gordon had seen her grandson racked with asthma in the early 1990s in West Oakland in California. Fumes from the trucks carrying freight from the nearby port, among the United States’ largest, led to one in five children in the area seeking emergency care visits for respiratory illnesses like her grandson’s. The dust didn’t spare the elderly, either, and there was a high rate of incidences of cardiovascular disease among those above 60 years of age.
In 2013, Gordon heard that part of the port would be turned into a coal terminal to ship coal mined in Utah and other western US states to Asian markets. With the coal meant to be transported by train, there were concerns that the accompanying coal dust in the air would worsen asthma and other respiratory illnesses, she said.
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Gordon started a campaign that led to a series of lawsuits and a city ordinance to block the transport of coal through Oakland, contributing to a more-than-decade-long delay in the project.
Then on June 4, the administration of United States President Donald Trump invoked the 1950s era’s Defense Production Act to announce support for 14 coal plants across multiple states. The $700m package to revive the ailing coal industry would also fund the setting up of coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia, the first new coal plants in the US in more than a decade. It also includes $75m to revive the troubled Oakland coal terminal.
Together, the measures would “bring down the price of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with the power of clean coal”, as well as create 14,000 jobs, Trump said while unveiling the package at the White House. The jobs would bring relief in mostly red states where the decline of the coal industry had led to job losses and economic blight.
But the package has also put Gordon and her coalition of Oakland residents and environmental groups on a collision course with the federal administration.
It has also intertwined the fate of communities in Utah and other states, where the decline in coal has led to a decline in public services, with those in Oakland, where coal could bring ill health.
“Ever since we heard of it, we don’t want the coal terminal,” says Gordon, who, now 79, has restarted her campaign to oppose the terminal, including with meetings with residents in West Oakland and its neighbouring towns where hundreds of people have turned up.
They also supported a bill by California State Assembly Member Mia Bonta that calls for additional environmental review of coal projects in the state. Lateefah Simon, a US Congress representative from Oakland, also moved legislation to block water and power funds for coal projects that would include the Oakland terminal.
No Coal in Oakland campaigners attend a protest [Saumya Roy/Al Jazeera]Doing more for coal
Gordon and her coalition had first heard of the plan to bring coal by train to the Oakland port from a Utah newspaper.
Coal production for bituminous coal, the kind Utah mines produce, has fallen precipitously from 693 million short tonnes in 1990 to 263 million short tonnes in 2023, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Production of non-bituminous coal, the kind produced in Wyoming and other states, has also fallen from 539 million short tonnes to 271 million short tonnes from 2008 to 2023.
The terminal was seen as a plan to boost production by finding foreign buyers.
The reduced production also led to coal jobs halving, with few coal workers successfully moving to other jobs.
While coal jobs had been gradually shrinking on the back of increasing automation, reduced tax revenues from coal operations hit communities hard, says Daniel Raimi, director for the Communities in Energy Transition Initiative at Resources for the Future, an independent Washington, DC-based think tank.
“Public spending on schools and other services comes down with these tax revenues,” he said.
Trump campaigned on easing this pain in coal communities, and his administration has announced a range of measures including extending closure dates for coal plants, easing toxic pollutant emission norms for them, and directing the Pentagon to buy more energy from coal plants.
“This administration has done more than any other administration to boost coal,” said Raimi.
But “even with all this, a coal revival seems unlikely”, said Stephanie Chase, research and communications manager at the Energy and Policy Institute, an energy policy watchdog in California.
Other analysts point to the growing need for power in the US with the rise in AI data centres as well as higher temperatures because of climate change. This has led to higher power rates, and coal could be a part of the mix of energy sources needed to address this.
Demand for energy is being met through geothermal and natural gas, “not new coal”, Chase said.
First ships to leave in 2028
If the coal terminal project comes through, coal-filled trains will “pass through an intense urban area”, complete with football fields, farms, schools and low- and middle-income homes, said Ben Eichenberg, a lawyer at Baykeeper, a San Francisco-based environmental nonprofit that has mounted litigation against the terminal.
“This will leave fine and coarse dust that could cause asthma and cardiovascular disease in an area where people are already hurting,” he said, referring to Gordon’s decades-long campaign to document and curb the impact of vehicular pollution.
Phil Tagami, the terminal’s developer, had sued the city for imposing an ordinance that blocked coal from passing through Oakland. Last September, the California Supreme Court paved the way for the project to go ahead.
The project is still mired in litigation in a Kentucky district court where Insight Terminal Solutions, Tagami’s sub-lessee for the port, has alleged that it went bankrupt because of the city ordinance that did not allow coal to be transported. In this case, too, a judge had ordered the city to pay $230m for restricting the port.
After the court judgements, Tagami said that the project would resume and the first ships would leave the terminal in early 2028. The $75m federal government grant could act as a further shot in the arm.
But “this will contribute only a part of the $237m project”, said Colin O’Brien, a deputy managing lawyer at Earthjustice, an environmental litigation outfit. “They still need to raise a lot more.”
No coal in Oakland
No Coal in Oakland, a coalition of residents from Oakland and neighboring Bay Area cities, has campaigned against the coal terminal for more than a decade, filing lawsuits and pushing for further environmental review of the project.
Ted Franklin, a lawyer who is a member of No Coal in Oakland, says the trains could deposit arsenic, mercury and lead along with particulate matter in their communities. “No one wants to be part of the sacrifice zone,” he said.
Members of his group wore red “No Coal In Oakland” T-shirts at a Juneteenth event last month, campaigning against the coal terminal amid music and fried chicken stalls. Gordon, who now walks with the help of a walker, joined them, planning for more public meetings to oppose the terminal.
“The project is supposed to be state of the art and highly automated, so it will not lead to many jobs being created here, either,” Franklin said.
His group is now looking at pushing against the project through a thorough environmental impact review as well as the permitting process.
At the June White House announcement, Trump was joined by Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon. His state produces more coal than any other in the country. Weeks earlier, Governor Gordon had visited Japan and Taiwan to promote Wyoming coal. If it comes through, the Oakland terminal will provide the gateway for this.
“They are representing historic interests rather than future interests,” said the Energy and Policy Institute’s Chase.
Raimi of Resources for the Future says coal from Indonesia and Australia might still be more easily accessible in Asia than American coal. But the package and terminal could provide support to the state’s coal industry.
