As many of the nation's coal plants continue to age, bringing them back up to code and extending their productive lives is becoming more and more of a costly endeavor, all the more so due to new EPA restrictions on emissions standards. When you combine that with the ever-falling price of natural gas, coal's newest and most aggressive competitor, you start to get a picture of how utilities companies are looking at coal these days, and what this could mean for the coal industry as a whole. In this video, Motley Fool energy analyst Taylor Muckerman takes us through some of the specifics of how coal companies are suffering, as the competition continues to get tougher year by year.
