“There’s no relationship between what we’re seeing in the real world and what the Trump administration is doing in terms of energy policy,” said David Victor, a chairman of the Brookings Institution’s Energy Security and Climate Initiative and a professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego.

Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Perry have regularly proclaimed their support for clean coal — a broad, nontechnical term that is generally understood to refer to coal that is burned in conjunction with technology that strips away pollutants such as soot, mercury and carbon dioxide — exactly the technologies developed in the Morgantown lab that Mr. Trump’s budget proposes to cut.

The global economy will increasingly demand cheap electricity produced with minimal toxic or planet-warming pollution. For coal to survive, it will need more technologies that extract the pollutants that foul the air and warm the planet. In the United States, government research labs like the one in Morgantown have focused in particular on “carbon capture and storage” technology, which strips out and stores carbon dioxide from burning coal. While the technology is too expensive to use commercially, researchers hope to reduce costs and keep coal viable in a carbon-constrained world.

“The only way you’re going to be able to use the majority of fossil fuel assets in the United States while also addressing climate change concerns is to use this technology,” said Howard Herzog, an expert on carbon capture technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But Mr. Trump has shown little concern for climate change. He has announced the withdrawal of the United States from the international Paris climate accord and has instructed Mr. Pruitt to dismantle Mr. Obama’s climate-related regulations.

To date, efforts to deploy carbon capture technology commercially have failed. Last month, Southern Company, a major electric utility, stopped construction of a pilot carbon capture coal plant in Mississippi that was running three years behind schedule and $4 billion over budget. And government efforts to research breakthroughs in the technology have so far failed. The George W. Bush and Obama administrations spent close to a combined $2 billion on a failed carbon capture pilot plant.

The Trump budget for the fiscal year that begins in October also seems to have given up on clean coal. It would cut research and development for carbon capture and storage technology to about $35 million from more than $200 million.