On an afternoon in late September, a turn-of-season breeze blows in through the screen door as Mark Thatcher sits across from his wife Verna in their home in Kemmerer, Wyoming. The two are in their respective reclining chairs, discussing the incoming development of a nuclear plant along Highway 189, six miles away. Mark sinks deeper into his seat. His mind begins to wander a few miles down the street from the subject at hand, to the coal-burning Naughton Power Plant and Kemmerer coal mine where he worked for more than half his life. It’s how he paid for this house. It’s how he paid for kids to go to soccer practice and unwrap brand-new Barbie dolls on Christmas. Now, it’s why he and the other 2,500 people in Kemmerer have to reinvent themselves after more than a century of fueling a sense of identity, an economy and a country with coal.
Five months earlier, on April Fools’ Day, PacifiCorp announced its plan to convert the remaining two of Naughton Power Plant’s three units to natural gas in just two years. This energy transition will be the plant’s swan song before it closes completely in 2036. When it does, the fate of the last operating coal mine in Kemmerer will hang in the balance. So, too, will the fates of the hundreds of miners who still work there. “Imagine the two biggest employers in your community going away,” says Brian Muir, Kemmerer City administrator, who was hired in 2019 to help Kemmerer survive the eventual closure of its coal operations. “Our backs are against the wall here. ... We need something.”
Renewable energy use surpassed coal consumption for the first time in more than a century last year, when it hit a low unseen since 1900. It’s continued to decrease over the last couple of decades — even in coal-friendly Wyoming, which produces more coal than any other state by a long shot, some 41 percent of the nation’s total, compared to West Virginia’s 14 percent. In May, the Bureau of Land Management proposed ending future coal leasing for the Powder River Basin in the northeastern half of the state, the most productive coal region in the country. That news alone is widely seen as the biggest step toward the end of the American coal mining industry altogether. President-elect Donald Trump, who promised to bring back “beautiful, clean coal” in his 2020 campaign, touted oil and gas exploration at his 2024 rallies. So it’s not clear whether his new administration will attempt to slow the pace of mine closures or challenge the push against new federal coal leases, if anything.
In most other corners of the country, mine closures might be celebrated as a march toward progress, a move in direct compliance with federal mandates to cut carbon emissions and curtail the effects of global warming before it’s too late. But in communities like Kemmerer, it’s also an existential threat. Beyond these fiscal casualties, coal has come to define a way of life, especially for the miners of Wyoming. As the mines shut down, it’s not a matter of if these people will survive, but a question of how. America is moving on. And they will have to, too.
Currently, there are fewer than 40,000 people working in the American coal industry. Yet nearly 15 million people — about 5 percent of the country’s population — live in communities that depend on the industry for their local economies, tax revenues and property values. Last year, coal exports brought the country $5 billion in revenue. Overall, the industry generates $27.6 billion annually, although that number pales in comparison to the more than $41 billion it brought in each year a decade ago.
Yet, an argument could be made that America needs more coal. Last year, coal generated 16 percent of electricity nationwide, about half as much as a decade prior. Federal projections estimate that share will get halved again by 2050. This is happening at a time in which America’s demand for power is outpacing supply. And it will get worse. A growing need for electricity, from the rise of electric vehicles to data centers for artificial intelligence, is poised to place an unprecedented pressure on the country’s energy infrastructure. Output will need to double within the next five years to accommodate an energy surge equivalent to adding another state of California to the nation’s power grid. Phasing out coal in the midst of this crisis has placed the country at a crossroads; a majority of Americans support prioritizing renewable energy development, yet less than half feel the nation is ready to phase out fossil fuels like coal completely.
Solutions, including Kemmerer’s bet on the nuclear plant that just broke ground in June, aren’t producing enough power right now to pick up the slack. The project by TerraPower, an energy company owned by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, is just one of the 34 new nuclear plants that the country will need within the next five years to keep up with the pace of power demand. If it’s successful, it will prompt at least five more TerraPower nuclear plants across Wyoming and Utah. “We’re trying to find other alternatives,” Muir says. “We were one of the first communities scheduled to be shut down. And still are.”
Mark listens in his living room lounger as Verna offers her own speculations. “It’s gonna get nuts,” she says. “We’re the guinea pigs.”
He had his finger, stained black by coal dust and grime, on the pulse of the rest of the world.
Before the advent of alternative energy production, before most of the world arrived at a consensus that burning fossil fuels shoulders most of the blame for a worsening climate, coal mining was a profession viewed with pride. Miners, whether above ground or below, powered the country. Mark Thatcher knew this at 19, when he began work at the now-defunct Price River Coal mine in Helper, Utah, a mere two days after his wedding with Verna in 1976. He was barely an adult when he started. Though, it’s there in the cold, cavernous belly of the planet, that he felt he truly came of age.
His team mostly consisted of Vietnam veterans newly returned from what was then the first and only televised war in American history. He felt fascinated by these men, most 10 to 20 years his senior, who had left one kind of darkness for another. Though he avoided asking many questions about their time overseas. They weren’t talkative, nor did the life-and-death conditions of the work that joined them lend much time for conversation. Yet they still communicated, their bodies moving in concert under uncertain earth. They relied on one another. If a roof bolter did not secure the overhead safety jacks, the roof would cave in and bury the miners alive. If a fire boss did not inspect the mine for gases like methane, an explosion would erupt and incinerate the crew in moments. “You learn to be interdependent and trust people,” Mark says. “That’s formative.”
Over nine years, he moved through the ranks: laborer, roof bolter, gas watchman, fire boss, section boss. When he got laid off, he found work at another mine in Rock Springs, Wyoming, and lived in a motel near the mine, driving hours home to Price every weekend to see Verna and their four kids. Eventually, he found an advertisement in the Big Nickel classifieds for a job in Kemmerer. They all moved in 1988 for Mark to begin work at the mine. “We used everything we had to stay afloat, and when we moved up here, we moved up here on nothing. Had to borrow money to get the lights turned on,” he says. “We were both just starting out in our 30s with four kids, and, well, off we went.”
He was the first new hire in six years, a lucky standout to secure a job as an electrician amid mass layoffs that had resulted in more than 70 cuts. It was a job he had done before, in an industry he’d grown accustomed to, in a state just over the border from Utah. The town in many ways mirrored his hometown, yet everything about the work felt different. The equipment was far larger, monstrosities of machinery capable of processing thousands of tons of coal every hour. Mark worked surrounded by seams of coal 20 feet thick and exposed to the elements. He suffered blistering sunburns in the summer and risked frostbite in the winter.
Yet somehow, the grueling labor carried with it a certain awe and mysticism. There’s the wonder of witnessing a prehistoric timeline each day, a secret world dug beneath the present one that’s hundreds of millions of years old. But most of all, there’s pride. He and his co-workers were responsible for producing the power the rest of the country depended on. Wyoming has been the top coal-producing state for almost four decades, but most of that energy goes elsewhere. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the state produces 12 times more energy than it consumes. At the time of Mark’s career in Kemmerer, coal fueled more than 50 percent of all the electricity generated nationwide.
He was a single degree of separation from the heating systems that prevented ranching families in Montana from freezing in their own homes during brutal winters; from the subway system in New York City that bridged millions of commuters day after day; from the television sets aglow in Oklahoma suburbs at 7 p.m. like holiday lights, transmitting the news and the sitcoms that follow. He had his finger, stained black by coal dust and grime, on the pulse of the rest of the world. All while remaining nameless and living in a rural town most Americans have never heard of. “That was life,” he says. “Ninety percent of the time I had the best job at the mine, and 10 percent was the worst.” He only retired in 2018 at the age of 61 when he discovered a tumor on his adrenal gland. Otherwise he would have kept working.
“Wyoming has this culture of fossil fuel production, a pride around powering the nation, because we export so much of our energy,” says Robert Godby, an associate professor at the University of Wyoming who researches energy and environmental economics. But the energy industry has changed. “Suddenly, not only are they seeing their livelihoods threatened, but at the same time, they’re being demonized by certain sections of society for being the people who are killing the planet,” Godby says. “They didn’t choose to kill the planet. They’re just trying to make a living like everybody else.”
Whatever pride once seemed synonymous with coal mining has now withered away to shame.
Reforms and regulations to reduce the environmental impact of fossil fuel extraction first rolled out en masse in the 1970s, as the negative, long-term health and environmental consequences of coal mining became irrefutable. Streams choked by loose sediment and sulfuric acid, altered topography and oxide-stained rock, destroyed natural habitats, acid rain and carcinogenic ash carried downwind to communities all became matters of public knowledge and concern. Americans everywhere expressed outrage. Even oil companies like Exxon internally acknowledged a need to divest from coal for the first time. Though that decade-defining awareness took far longer to reach Lynne Huskinson and the rest of Gillette, Wyoming.
Huskinson began working as a truck driver at the Belle Ayr open-pit coal mine in 1979, the year after the Wyoming Constitution was changed to allow women miners. It wasn’t a dream job by any means, but the promise of a high-paying salary for a 19-year-old without a college degree felt too good to pass up. She spent 39 years there, working her way up to a technician operating electric shovels and wheel loaders capable of hauling hundreds of tons of earth. As the years passed she became more worried about the negative environmental impact of coal mining. It was only after Huskinson and hundreds of her co-workers got laid off in 2019 that she had enough time to really think about how she felt about coal mining, which eventually led to anger, and then action.
She joined the Powder River Basin Resource Council and the Western Organization of Resource Councils, environmental organizations that advocate against coal mine expansion in the Powder River Basin. They successfully pushed the Bureau of Land Management to end federal coal leasing in the region earlier this year.
Huskinson now occupies a unique place — that of a former miner who advocates against the industry. On one hand, there’s the knowledge that mines in Wyoming produce more carbon dioxide pollution than anywhere else in the country. On the other hand, they are the lifeblood of the local economy.
The Wyoming Mining Association reported last year that coal miners make an average of $94,807, not including benefits. Their take-home pay is twice the statewide average. “It’s just been such a constant, available work,” Huskinson says. “I started when I was 19. I retired when I was 60. But in my 50s, I was embarrassed to tell people I was a coal miner.” She believes in the need for an energy transition, but she also fears her economy will capsize if coal mines close without any plans in place to replace those jobs. No matter what happens, she feels like Wyoming will be losing something.
And it’s not just jobs. State taxes on minerals run the government, fund schools, build highways and maintain waterways. When coal output slowed in the past and that cash flow ceased, the government proposed slashing statewide programs for the elderly, poor, incarcerated and mentally ill. Schools lost hundreds of millions of dollars in possible funding. Small towns had to consider opting out of sewer maintenance. Huskinson ran for the Wyoming House of Representatives in 2020 on a campaign to disincentivize fossil fuels and rethink the state’s tax structure, to change the economic scaffolding that makes an energy transition so tricky in Wyoming, but she lost. And half expected to. “We’re getting closer to the end of coal. I would have said the same thing five years ago,” she says. “I’m not afraid to be against what everybody else is, but it’s not a popular opinion where I live.”
Unlike Gillette, Kemmerer is at least attempting to prepare for an energy transition. Huskinson looks to the tiny speck of town more than 400 miles away from hers as a source of inspiration. Maybe it will offer an example of how local economies can transition in the wake of national change. Or maybe it will serve as a warning. “If you live in Kemmerer, you just want to see some revenue. It’s anything to keep the town at this point,” she says. “I don’t know how you could be a coal miner and not be worried it could just all fall apart.”
“Our backs are against the wall here... We need something.”
Apart from the environmental consequences at the heart of the energy transition, coal is also a finite resource. Recoverable coal reserves across producing mines nationwide are expected to run out within the next two decades. That leaves little time to balance the economic, social and political complications of finding its replacement, and those attempts are only beginning to take shape in some Western and Appalachian states. Even then, not everyone has given up on coal.
Cliff Green only joined the industry five years ago. The 48-year-old drives his white Chevrolet pickup 140 miles every day for work, a little more than an hour from his home in Green River to the Kemmerer mine and back. He sees no end to coal in sight. In his mind, it’s been a reliable fuel source for more than a century and doesn’t see that changing any time soon. Electric grids will still operate on fossil fuels. Electric cars will still be bought off the lots of dealerships across the nation. Life will go on, as we know it. “A lot of people drive electric cars and want to get rid of coal, but still want to have an electric car because fossil fuels are bad,” he says. “But where do they get the stuff to make batteries? Out of the ground. Mining.”
Yet the job market doesn’t seem to have the same confidence in coal’s longevity. Before Kemmerer, Green worked at Black Butte, another mine in southern Wyoming. He’d been making more money than he ever did as a commercial heavy equipment mechanic, 11 more dollars every hour for the same job title. Neither of his parents had been miners. He had no connection to the industry and no inside knowledge of its decline. So when Green got handed a pink slip announcing his layoff a few weeks before Christmas, he felt blindsided. “They never gave us any indication at all,” he says. “Monday morning we came in, they called us up to the top of the trim and said, ‘Well, we got some bad news. We’re laying you off.’ That was the only warning we got. It wasn’t real comfortable.”
There were not many other options after that. The mine in Kemmerer offered the same pay range for the same responsibilities, and it meant he’d get back to work less than a year after his layoff, so Green figured it was worth the commute. Even with a retirement date for the mine looming. He works at the same mine where Mark Thatcher worked, the same one that sits a few miles across the street from where the incoming nuclear plant will be. Right now, construction of the nuclear reactor promises an estimated 1,600 temporary jobs. But once it’s completed, it will provide the community with only about 250 permanent jobs — including lower-paid positions like security detail.
Green is applying elsewhere just in case. But he’s not hopeful about his prospects. For all this talk of energy transition, especially among national advocates and politicians, the reality is not enough has changed to make it seamless. More clean energy jobs are materializing nationwide, with some 8 million to date, but they still account for less than half of opportunities within the energy industry. Wyoming has fewer clean energy jobs than any other state nationwide. Those new jobs are not filled quickly enough, either. Most require at least a bachelor’s degree, whereas coal mining is more accessible with fewer barriers to entry. “It seems like everything’s kind of slowing down, and you wonder what’s going to happen,” Green says.
The space coal has carved for itself in the industry took more than a century to make. It has a place in the living rooms, kitchens, cars and workplaces of every person in the nation. But the consequences associated with its extraction have made its end inescapable. Natural gas is cleaner while still efficient, but it also relies on fossil fuels. It’s finite. Even nuclear energy won’t last forever since it’s dependent on uranium, though it’s more plausible and less polarizing than renewables. In the eyes of many, that makes it the perfect candidate for launching a larger energy revolution, one that now has a foothold in Kemmerer.
Despite the writing on the wall, Green is still in search of his own next chapter of the American dream — the slice of wish fulfillment Huskinson and the Thatchers got before the coal industry came crashing down. He’s still a believer in coal, too, hellbent on the unlikely assertion that it will come back into prominence. Or maybe that’s just the fantasy he sells himself to keep driving those 140 miles each day. “I guess I got to do what I got to do,” he says. And so he does.
This story appears in the December 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.