Very cool, if true

The US mines and burns about 780 million tonnes of coal as year (similar to China's per capita coal consumption of about 3 billion tonnes a year) and that amount will probably not decrease significantly in the next ten to twenty years (2018 consumption is on track to be the same as 2017, pretty much). There are about 50,000 coal mining jobs in the US, that number will probably decrease a little over the next twenty years or so.

Coal is mined predominantly in two regions-- Appalachia and the Powder River basin area in the mid-West. Roughly half of the annual output comes from each region but the mid-West does that with only ten thousand workers and heavy automation. Appalachia mostly does mountaintop removal to get at the coal reserves there, more labour intensive and thus more expensive. There are several hundred years of proven coal reserves safe within the borders of the US at that rate of consumption and it's cheap energy, a production cost of ten dollars a tonne at the minehead in South Dakota. That's why coal will not die.