American coal consumption is forecast to fall 7% in 2026, to 419 million short tons, according to the Energy Information Administration’s November Short-Term Energy Outlook. The outlook, released on Nov. 10, expects consumption to slip by another 5% in 2027.
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Working backward, 419 million short tons after a 7% decline implies 2025 consumption near 450 million, and a further 5% drop would put 2027 near 398 million. Those totals are arithmetic on EIA’s percentages rather than numbers the agency prints in the passage.
Production falls less than consumption
EIA’s electricity section states that coal production decreases by just 2% in 2026 as rising exports partly offset the drop in consumption. The agency’s coal passage quantifies the export side at an 11% increase over 2025 in 2026, then flat shipments in 2027. Production is forecast to fall 4% in 2027, when exports stop growing and domestic burn keeps declining.
A market that burns 7% less while mining only 2% less has to send the difference somewhere, and the forecast sends it abroad.
Compounding the two forecast declines gives a sense of the two-year path. A 7% drop followed by a 5% drop leaves 2027 consumption about 11.6% below 2025, whereas production, down 2% and then 4%, ends about 6% lower. The gap between those two paths is the volume that exports and inventories must absorb, and EIA says exports rise 11% in 2026 and then hold flat.
Coal’s 15% slice of U.S. generation
EIA’s generation table puts coal’s share of U.S. electricity at 16% in 2024, 17% in 2025, 15% in 2026 and 15% in 2027. The 2025 uptick and the 2026 retreat of two points are the main movements; the flat 2026-to-2027 reading sits beside a forecast 5% decline in tonnage. The table rounds shares to whole numbers, so a fraction of a point can hide in that gap, and the published figures alone cannot settle it.
Total generation keeps growing meanwhile. The agency expects almost 4,390 billion kilowatthours in 2026, a record and up 2.7% from 2025, with growth slowing to 1.2% in 2027. Coal is therefore shrinking inside a market that is expanding, which is the opposite of the demand-collapse pattern that sometimes drives fuel declines. The 2026 drop also follows a bump. The 17% share in 2025 was the highest of the four years in EIA’s table, so part of the forecast decline reverses that rise while the 16% reading for 2024 shows where the share stood a year earlier.
Solar, wind and gas fill the gap
EIA says most of the generation growth over the forecast period comes from utility-scale solar plants. Solar’s share rises from 7% in 2025 to 8% in 2026 and 10% in 2027, while wind goes from 11% to 12% by 2027 and natural gas holds at 40% in 2026 before easing to 39% in 2027. Roughly 72 GW of new solar capacity and 20 GW of new wind are slated to come online over the forecast window, according to the same section.
Gas has a price advantage in the forecast. The agency’s natural gas section projects Henry Hub at an average of $3.37 in 2026, down from $3.53 in 2025, and the winter outlook now sits at $2.87 per million British thermal units, as detailed in the gas summary. Cheaper gas and growing solar both compete for the generation that coal used to supply. Storage backs that up: EIA has raised its end-of-November inventory projection to 3,840 Bcf and sees dry production averaging 113.01 Bcf a day in 2026. More supply keeps gas prices low, and low gas prices are the direct competitive pressure on coal-fired plants that run on thin margins.
Forecast scope: consumption, not mining or exports
The 2026 number is a forecast. EIA completed it on Nov. 5, with most of the year already in the books, and the next edition on Dec. 8 will update it. The outlook names no individual analyst, so the claim rests on the agency itself, and the 419 million figure covers consumption rather than mining or exports.
Exports deserve a second look because they cushion coal miners. The 11% gain in 2026 is measured against 2025 shipments, and the flat 2027 assumption means export growth stops helping just as production falls 4%. Producers therefore face two lean years in the agency’s forecast: a 2026 in which overseas buyers soften the domestic decline by taking more coal, and a 2027 in which they add nothing further to the total. Mine output still slips in both years, because the export cushion is partial and domestic burn keeps shrinking underneath it.
The unresolved piece is exports. EIA assumes an 11% rise in 2026 and a flat 2027, yet the passage does not name the destination markets or contracts behind that assumption. If shipments underperform, production would have to fall further than the 2% the agency expects for 2026, and the full outlook at EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook page is where the revision would first appear.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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