Eastern Kentucky was built on coal. In Harlan, Pike, Letcher, Perry, Floyd, Knott, Breathitt, and the counties around them, the mine payroll has long paid the mortgage, the church, the ball team, and the school levy. When a mine idles or a plant retires, it is not an abstract energy statistic. It is a grocery store that shortens hours, a young family that leaves for Ohio, and a fiscal hole in the county budget. This Act treats that fact as the starting point: Kentucky will keep using coal through modern controls, capture, and coal-to-products so Eastern Kentucky keeps a real stake in the work.
Purpose. Hold Eastern Kentucky miners and towns in the energy future, and keep statewide power cheap and firm, by pairing Kentucky coal with cleaner technology.
The bill:
Establishes the Kentucky Clean Coal Prosperity Authority. The board includes an Eastern Kentucky county judge/executive, operators, the UMWA, utilities, and UK energy research, so coalfield counties are not spectators in Frankfort.
Creates a 25% capital tax credit for qualified clean-coal projects, plus hiring bonuses that pay extra for displaced miners and Kentucky-trained graduates. Credits may be sold once to a Kentucky taxpayer so a smaller East Kentucky operator can use them.
Funds apprenticeships at coalfield technical colleges, including Hazard, Prestonsburg, and Southeast Kentucky, so a miner who already knows underground work can move onto capture systems, plant instrumentation, reclamation, and critical-mineral processing without leaving the mountains.
Finances research on carbon capture, coal-to-products, and rare-earth recovery from coal and refuse—the same refuse piles that sit above Eastern Kentucky creeks—and offers a commercial-scale coal-to-products prize meant to put a factory payroll on reclaimed ground.
Directs the Public Service Commission to weigh firm, dispatchable power, including modernized coal units, when plants are proposed for retirement.
Reserves 10% of program funds for coalfield water, sewer, broadband, school shops, and reuse of mine land. That money is written for the counties that actually dug the coal.
Leaves air, water, and mining law in force. No support for a project that raises uncontrolled emissions. Stored carbon requires a long-term stewardship plan.
Why Eastern Kentucky comes first in the findings. Coal is still the industrial base that made those counties solvent. Severance, rail, and plant jobs have funded roads and classrooms that state aid alone does not replace. An energy policy that writes Eastern Kentucky out of generation also writes it out of the tax base. This Act is drafted so the next round of investment—capture retrofits, coal-to-products, and mineral recovery—lands in the same region that produced the coal, instead of sending the work and the watts somewhere else.
Intended results. Jobs that let Eastern Kentucky miners stay in the trade; payroll and school tax in the mountain counties; affordable, reliable power for homes, farms, and factories across the Commonwealth; research work for students; a domestic source of critical minerals from coal wastes; and cleaner stacks and streams than the last generation of plants.
Funding. $50 million in each of fiscal years 2026–27 and 2027–28, with federal and private match sought.
