Two Signatures
How the same administration that set out to end coal wrote the law that funded its reinvention
By Matthew McKean, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder • Frontieras North America
In February of 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, requiring a ninety percent reduction in mercury emissions from American power plants. It was the most expensive rule in the agency's history to that point, and everyone in the industry understood exactly what it was for. It was designed to make the older half of the coal fleet uneconomic to operate.
Eight weeks later, on April 5, 2012, the same president signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act.
Three years after that, the pattern repeated almost to the calendar. On June 19, 2015, Regulation A+ went into effect under Title IV of the JOBS Act, giving ordinary Americans the legal right to buy equity in private companies for the first time since 1933. Six weeks later, on August 3, 2015, the administration announced the Clean Power Plan, a rule engineered to cut power-sector carbon emissions thirty-two percent below 2005 levels, with coal generation as the explicit target.
One hand was building the machinery to retire the American coal industry. The other hand, without knowing it, was building the instrument that would fund the technology to redefine it.
The Clean Power Plan is gone. The Supreme Court gutted it in West Virginia v. EPA in 2022. The JOBS Act is still on the books, still working, and Frontieras North America has used it to bring the industry's rebirth to more than twelve thousand American shareholders.
I have been thinking about that for a while now, and I do not think it is a coincidence. I think it is a lesson about what government can and cannot do.
What They Meant To Do
The intent was never hidden. On January 17, 2008, a year before he took office, candidate Barack Obama sat down with the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle and said that anybody who wanted to build a coal plant was welcome to try, and that "it will bankrupt them," because of what they would be charged for the greenhouse gas coming out of the stack. He was describing a cap-and-trade system he never got through Congress. What he got instead was the EPA, and the EPA did the job the legislation could not.
Almost nobody reads the rest of that answer, and the rest of that answer is the interesting part. In the same breath he said he had never been a coal booster, that he did not believe coal should be taken off the table as an ideological matter, and that if technology allowed us to use coal cleanly, we ought to pursue it.
He set a condition. Eighteen years later that condition has been met, and it was met by a company his own signature made possible. Hold onto that, because we are coming back to it.
Now give the campaign its due. It was well funded, well coordinated, and for about a decade it worked.
The Sierra Club's Beyond Coal effort began in earnest with a fifty million dollar contribution from Michael Bloomberg in 2011, a figure that eventually exceeded a billion dollars in cumulative anti-coal and anti-fossil commitments. The campaign claims credit for the announced retirement of 372 of the nation's 530 coal plants, better than seventy percent of the fleet.
The capital markets moved in parallel. Between 2015 and 2016, the six largest banks in the United States adopted formal restrictions on coal lending. Citi cut its coal exposure by eighty-seven percent by mid-2018. JPMorgan pledged to zero out its coal mining credit exposure entirely. More than fifty coal companies filed for bankruptcy between 2014 and 2016. Peabody Energy, the largest private-sector coal company on earth, went from a market capitalization of $19.7 billion at its 2011 peak to roughly $38 million by the time it filed in April of 2016. That is a ninety-nine point eight percent decline in five years.
Regulation squeezed the operators. Capital starved them. The combination was intentional and it was effective.
What It Cost, And Who Paid
Policy is written in Washington and paid for by zip code.
McDowell County, West Virginia was one of the great coal counties in America. In 1950 it had 98,887 residents. Today it has fewer than seventeen thousand. The poverty rate is 30.9 percent, more than double the national figure. Median household income is under thirty thousand dollars. In 2013 McDowell County ranked dead last among all 3,142 counties in the United States for life expectancy, and the number for men had actually fallen over the preceding three decades while the national average rose.
Nobody in Washington set out to do that to McDowell County. That is precisely the point. The men who wrote those rules were confident they understood the consequences of their actions, and they were wrong about the ones that mattered most.
The Unseen
Frédéric Bastiat wrote the definitive essay on this in 1850. He called it That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen. His argument was that a bad economist confines himself to the visible effect of a policy, while a good one accounts for the effects that must be foreseen. The visible effects of the war on coal were the plant closures and the emissions curves, and those were reported endlessly. The unseen effects were the counties that hollowed out, the grid reliability that quietly eroded, and the industrial capacity that left the country and did not come back.
But Bastiat's principle cuts in both directions, and this is the part almost nobody appreciates. Policy generates unseen benefits just as reliably as it generates unseen costs, and it has no more control over one than the other.
The JOBS Act was not written for coal. It was written for Silicon Valley. Congress was thinking about software companies and biotech startups and the shrinking number of firms willing to endure a traditional public offering. The stated goal was to create an on-ramp to the capital markets for emerging growth companies. Nobody in that room was thinking about Appalachia.
What the law actually did was end the requirement that a person be wealthy in order to invest in something before it became obvious. That single change did not care about the intentions of its authors. It applied to everyone.
Now consider the timing of what it would eventually fund.
In 2011, the year Michael Bloomberg wrote his first fifty million dollar check to Beyond Coal and Peabody Energy was still worth $19.7 billion, the international patent declaration for Joe Witherspoon's Solid Carbon Fractionation process was filed, covering up to 153 countries. The work had been underway since roughly 2010, self-funded, in a country that had already decided coal was a closed chapter.
Read that again. The demolition of the American coal industry and the invention of its replacement chemistry were happening in the same year, on the same continent, and neither party had the slightest idea the other existed. One was underwritten by a billionaire and covered on the front page of every major newspaper in America. The other was a licensed professional engineer with a career at Chevron, Marathon, Sinclair, and Enterprise Products behind him, sitting with a molecule the market had stopped bothering to look at, and understanding that nobody had ever actually asked what was inside it. They had only ever asked how hot it would burn.
That is what unseen means. Not hidden. Just unattended.
And so a statute drafted to help venture-backed technology companies became the legal foundation for something its authors never contemplated: a coal utilization technology, funded by working Americans, in the middle of a decade when no institution in the country would touch the sector.
The Reversal Nobody Wants To Talk About
Here is where it gets genuinely strange.
Coal did not die. Global coal consumption rose from roughly 6,700 million tonnes in 2015 to approximately 8,800 million tonnes in 2025. Coal still generates more than thirty-five percent of the world's electricity. United States coal demand rose eight percent in 2025 and coal remains sixteen percent of American power generation. American coal exports have increased sixty-nine percent since 2000.
Then artificial intelligence arrived, and the arithmetic changed for everyone at once.
Data centers consumed about 4.4 percent of American electricity in 2023. The Department of Energy projects between 6.7 and twelve percent by 2028. The International Energy Agency projects that natural gas and coal together will supply more than forty percent of incremental data center electricity demand worldwide through 2030. Meanwhile there are roughly 10,300 generation and storage projects sitting in the American interconnection queue representing about 1,400 gigawatts of capacity, and last year the country built 322 miles of high-voltage transmission against a national need of roughly five thousand miles per year.
You cannot wish that gap away, and you cannot build your way out of it on the timeline the technology industry is operating on.
So the same institutions that spent a decade divesting from coal are now signing power purchase agreements for coal-fired generation to run their data centers. Utilities are negotiating hyperscaler contracts for output from plants that were scheduled to close. The Department of Energy has allocated $175 million to extend the operating lives of three West Virginia coal plants, and coal has been designated essential infrastructure with more than thirteen million acres of federal land opened for development. The Department of War is now authorized to enter long-term power purchase agreements for defense baseload.
They spent a billion dollars trying to bury coal and signed the law that let ordinary Americans dig it back up. Now the same institutions that swore off the industry are lining up for coal-fired power to run their servers. Government cannot pick winners. It can only pick who gets to try.
What We Built With It
Frontieras has raised tens of millions of dollars across two SEC-qualified offerings from more than twelve thousand shareholders, who have placed over fifteen thousand separate investments. That gap between the two numbers is the part I would ask you to sit with. Thousands of our shareholders came back and bought again. I want to be precise about who those people are. They are welders and nurses and retired miners and small business owners and mothers who put a few hundred dollars into something they believed in. Not one of them qualified as an accredited investor under the rules that governed American capital formation for eighty years. Under the old regime, every one of them would have been told to wait until the institutions had taken their positions and the easy money was gone.
They funded FASForm, our patented Solid Carbon Fractionation process, which does not burn coal at all. It disassembles it, separating the hydrocarbon into ultra-low sulfur diesel, naphtha, jet fuel, hydrogen, purified solid carbon, sulfuric acid, and ammonium sulfate fertilizer through the Witherspoon Method. Zero waste. No combustion. Patents granted across nine of the largest coal-producing nations on five continents.
They funded the 184-acre site in Mason County, West Virginia, where we broke ground on April 2, 2026, with the governor and both United States senators in attendance, on a project that will create roughly two thousand construction jobs in a region that was told its industrial era was finished.
And they funded FASGEN, the platform designed to co-locate with the existing coal fleet, more than two hundred plants still operating in this country, forty-three percent of that capacity with no announced retirement date at all. Those are the plants the federal government is now paying to keep alive. They are the same plants the hyperscalers need. They are the plants FASGEN was built to upgrade.
There is one more thread in this, and I did not fully appreciate it myself until I sat down to write it out.
The Clean Power Plan did not die of natural causes. It was killed in court, and the case that killed it is called West Virginia v. EPA because the attorney general of West Virginia brought it. Patrick Morrisey assembled a coalition of two dozen states in October of 2015, secured a Supreme Court stay in 2016 that stopped the rule before it ever took effect, and won the case outright six to three in June of 2022.
Patrick Morrisey is now the governor of West Virginia. He announced our $850 million investment in Mason County. He stood on that ground with us at the groundbreaking.
Follow the whole thread. The rule written to end American coal was defeated by the attorney general of the state that generates a higher share of its electricity from coal than any other in the union. That man is now the governor of that state. And the technology that retires coal as something you set on fire is being built inside his borders, on a bluff above the Ohio River, financed under a law signed by the president whose rule he beat.
If you tried to write that as fiction, an editor would send it back.
And there is one last turn, the one I have the hardest time letting go of.
Go back to the rule this essay opened with. The Mercury and Air Toxics Standards of February 2012 demanded a ninety percent reduction in mercury emissions from American power plants, and the industry spent billions on control equipment to comply. All of that money went to chasing mercury up the stack after the coal had already been set on fire.
FASForm does not chase it. Because we never burn the coal, the mercury never has the chance to become airborne. It is separated inside the reactor along with the sulfur, the arsenic, and everything else conventional combustion sends into the sky, and it comes out with the byproducts rather than out the chimney. The mercury and the sulfur bond in the reactor to form mercury sulfide, an inert compound and the same stable mineral form that mercury takes in nature. Our commercial design basis eliminates approximately one hundred percent of airborne mercury emissions, along with roughly ninety-seven percent of sulfur oxides.
The EPA asked for ninety percent and built a rule intended to close the coal fleet in order to get it. The technology funded under that same administration's other law delivers effectively all of it. No scrubber. No subsidy. And the sulfur that conventional operators pay to dispose of leaves our facility as fertilizer headed for American farmland.
I asked Joe Witherspoon about this, since he is the man who invented the process and wrote the patents that protect it. His answer was characteristically unimpressed with itself.
“We were not trying to solve mercury. We were trying to take the molecule apart without setting it on fire, and to do that you have to run the reactor in a reducing atmosphere with the sulfur still in the system. The mercury finds the sulfur on its own. It comes out as mercury sulfide, inert, the same form it takes in the ground. I did not design that. The chemistry did it for me. In this work, the results you did not go looking for are usually the ones worth having.”
That is the same lesson the JOBS Act taught, arriving from the opposite direction. Nobody engineers the best outcomes. They fall out of a system when someone finally sets the conditions right and stops trying to force the result.
The Lesson
Now come back to that condition.
The standard the man set in 2008 was reasonable enough on its face: if technology made it possible to use coal cleanly, we ought to pursue it. I agree with him completely, and I would say so to his face. FASForm meets that standard. Effectively all of the airborne mercury gone, ninety-seven percent of the sulfur oxides gone, no combustion, no waste stream, and the contaminants leaving as fertilizer rather than sitting in an impoundment pond. We got there without a mandate and without a dollar of subsidy.
The condition was met. It was simply met by people nobody in that room in San Francisco was thinking about, on a timeline nobody controlled, through a law written for an entirely different purpose.
I do not write this to score a point against an administration that left office years ago. I write it because there is a durable truth underneath it that every investor, every policymaker, and every American who cares about this country's industrial future ought to internalize.
Governments cannot eliminate an industry that the laws of physics and the demands of civilization require. They can make it more expensive, they can starve it of capital, they can drive it offshore, and they can impoverish the communities that depend on it. What they cannot do is repeal the fact that industry runs on energy density, and that the world contains more coal than any other hydrocarbon by a wide margin.
What government can do, and did do almost by accident, is get out of the way of the people willing to solve the problem. The JOBS Act did not subsidize us. It did not pick us. It simply removed a barrier and let Americans decide for themselves where to put their money.
They decided. More than twelve thousand of them, and a great many decided twice.
That is what makes this country work when it works. Not central planning, not mandates, not billion-dollar campaigns to destroy an industry from the outside. Ordinary people with capital and conviction, backing a technology that turns the most abundant hydrocarbon on earth into abundant, affordable, available energy for all.