The Colstrip power plant and the Spring Creek Mine received lifelines last week as the Trump administration moved to prop up the flagging coal industry by rolling back pollution regulations adopted by Trump’s predecessor and expanding access to federal coal.
On March 12, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it’s initiating a review of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, or MATS, rule that the Biden administration adopted in April to limit emissions of heavy metals and other toxic materials that become airborne when coal is burned to produce electricity. The following day, the Interior Department announced it was authorizing an expansion of Montana’s largest coal mine.
Republican elected officials in Montana, who have long pushed for the continued operation of Colstrip and boosted efforts to access the state’s vast coal reserves, cheered the developments. Environmental and conservation groups criticized the decisions, arguing that the rollbacks will damage Montanans’ health and industries reliant on clean air and water, reports Montana Free Press.
Lee Zeldin, who represented New York in the U.S. Congress before assuming the helm of the EPA, described the agency’s decision to revisit the rule as part of “the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in the history of the United States.” Other rollbacks announced that same day involved tailpipe emissions standards and an “endangerment finding” dating to 2009 that gives the EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
“EPA needs to pursue commonsense regulation to Power the Great American Comeback, not continue down the last administration’s path of destruction and destitution,” Zeldin wrote in a release. “At EPA, we are committed to protecting human health and the environment; we are opposed to shutting down clean, affordable and reliable energy for American families.”
Montana Environmental Information Center Executive Director Anne Hedges countered that Zeldin is “gaslighting Americans” and “catering to the most polluting industries in the nation at the detriment of our most vulnerable populations: young children, the elderly, those with chronic health conditions, and other at-risk people.”
“Montanans support clean air, clean water, and a stable climate. Yet the EPA is now claiming that Americans will be better off with more pollution, weaker public health protections, and more arsenic, lead and mercury in our air and water,” Hedges wrote in a release. “The harm caused by these pollutants is not theoretical or partisan; scientific findings have proven that eating fish with mercury causes harm, breathing air with higher levels of particulate pollution leads to more hospital visits, increases in the levels of lead in the air and water decreases mental functions. These harms have been known for decades.”
Although a host of industry groups and Republican attorneys general from around the country — including Montana’s recently reelected Attorney General Austin Knudsen — have challenged the MATS rule, one large American coal plant is in a uniquely precarious position as a result of the rule’s regulations.
That plant is Colstrip, a nearly 40-year-old 1,480-megawatt facility that is the largest single electricity generator — and carbon dioxide source — in Montana.
In an August filing before the United States Supreme Court, plant co-owner NorthWestern Energy and plant operator Talen Montana argued that the MATS rule and a corollary EPA rule restricting emissions of greenhouse gases put an “untenable burden” on Colstrip’s co-owners.
“Because compliance with the Final Rule would require engineering and construction to begin immediately, Colstrip faces a stark choice during the pendency of the appeal of the Final Rule — (1) decide now to retire by the Final Rule’s compliance date (July 8, 2027) to avoid any expenditures, or (2) decide now to spend $350 million on new pollution control equipment until the Greenhouse Gas Rule, if upheld, forces a retirement four and a half years after,” NorthWestern and Talen wrote in their unsuccessful petition to the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of the rule. “Either choice is both irreversible and highly consequential for Colstrip, its owners, and Montana.”
To Hedges, the price tag for the plant to comply with the rule, a figure that could top $600 million, doesn’t justify the rule’s reversal.
“Giving the Colstrip plant — the most polluting coal plant in the nation — a free pass for a few more years when its peers installed pollution control technology years ago is unfair and it hurts people,” she argued.
Montana’s environmental regulator has joined industry groups and Republican politicians in seeking a reversal of the rule. Last month, during a legislative hearing about a proposal seeking to wrest regulation for some fossil fuel emissions from the federal government, Department of Environmental Quality Director Sonja Nowakowski told lawmakers the department “received very positive feedback” from the Trump administration regarding its request for a reversal of the MATS rule.
The EPA’s announcement doesn’t result in an immediate removal of the rule. In order to retire it, the agency must first create a replacement rule and justify its reasoning, University of Montana law professor Michelle Bryan told Montana Free Press in January. Bryan said that process would take at least a year (and possibly multiple years) to accommodate notice and comment requirements.
Additionally, in order to survive legal challenges, the agency would be required under the Administrative Procedures Act to explain why the MATS rule was “arbitrary and capricious,” Bryan said.
Asked if Colstrip’s co-owners will work toward compliance with the Biden rule while the Trump administration reviews it, NorthWestern Energy spokesperson Jo Dee Black argued “that would not be prudent” given the price tag for the upgrade.
“If the rule under review is modified, the substantial costs to implement the rule will not be needed,” Black wrote in an email to MTFP.
Currently, Colstrip has six plant owners, but NorthWestern Energy is set to more than double its ownership share in 2026 when it assumes the generation currently piped to two Pacific Northwest utilities that are transitioning away from fossil fuels. NorthWestern Energy is the state’s largest utility, serving approximately two-thirds of Montana’s electricity and natural gas customers.
EPA’s lifeline to Colstrip also included a near-term component. In addition to announcing the agency’s plan to claw back the 2024 rule, Zeldin announced that EPA is considering using a provision of the Clean Air Act to temporarily exempt power plants like Colstrip from compliance.
Under that provision of the law, emitters can be spared from a requirement to meet a particular standard for up to two years at a time “if the President determines that the technology to implement such a standard is not available and that it is in the national security interests of the United States to do so.”
While the rule review plays out in the executive branch, the legal battle involving many of the same parties is continuing to play out in the federal District Court for the District of Columbia.
On March 13, the day after the EPA’s move to remove the MATS rule, the Interior Department announced that it had approved an application to expand the Spring Creek Mine located in Big Horn County.
By authorizing the expansion, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement is facilitating access to 40 million tons of federal coal — enough, the agency said, to extend the life of the mine, Montana’s largest, by 16 years. Most of the coal the Navajo Transitional Energy Company mines at Spring Creek is bound for domestic power plants, though some of it is shipped to markets in Asia.
Doug Burgum, a Republican businessman who served as governor of North Dakota before his appointment to the Interior Department, wrote in a release that by authorizing the expansion, the federal government is “unleashing American energy, and ensuring our nation’s security and prosperity.”
The Spring Creek Mine move marked another reversal from climate change policies pursued by the Biden administration, which implemented a moratorium on new Powder River Basin coal mines last May and opted for a more modest expansion of Spring Creek after releasing an environmental impact statement for the mine.
About two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, OSMRE signaled its preference for a limited expansion of Spring Creek, which would have given NTEC access to an additional 19 million tons of coal — roughly half the amount Burgum’s Interior Department approved.
MTFP’s call to NTEC for comment on the expansion was not immediately returned Wednesday.
On Jan. 20, the first day of his second term in office, Trump announced an effort to “unleash” American energy by suspending, revising, or rescinding “unduly burdensome” agency actions. Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte has made a similar call, announcing at his State of the State address on Jan. 13 the creation of an “Unleashing Energy Task Force.”
This story was originally published by Montana Free Press at montanafreepess.org.
