Continuity, Symbiosis, and Stacking: Extracting Critical Minerals Value from Coal Waste in Pennsylvania

State and industry-backed efforts to remine coal wastes, such as coal ash, acid mine drainage, and waste coal, for critical minerals position new forms of extraction as both mining and remediation, give coal companies a stake in energy transitions, and promise to revive coal communities and bolster national security. Rather than viewing these waste-to-resource projects as the cutting edge of “circular economics,” I analyze them as the latest recurrence of the problem of eliminating coal wastes, which has historically been posed by the coal industry in its efforts to make coal production and consumption more intense and efficient by transforming its necessary wastes into unnecessary wastes. Focusing on these projects’ development in Pennsylvania, a site of past and ongoing coal mining, I build on geographic approaches to waste and the “stacking” of energy systems to show how these new projects are a form of “conservative innovation” aimed at extending the life span of coal. Rather than attempt to supersede its use, such initiatives aim to complexify and deepen existing coal value chains and further integrate them with other sectors, thus favoring technological pathways that articulate into continued coal combustion systems. Such outcomes further energy “additions” and “stacking” rather than energy transitions.