West Virginia’s governor said President Trump is “really interested” in his plan to pay power plants federal money to burn coal from Appalachia, according to a report.

Jim Justice, who announced he was switching from Democrat to Republican during an event with Trump last week in the Mountain State, said he has spent a “goodly amount of time” with the president and pitched an idea for the feds to pay $15 per ton to power plants that use coal from mines in the eastern US, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday.

“He’s really interested. He likes the idea,” said Justice, a billionaire coal and real estate magnate. “Naturally, he’s trying to vet the whole process. It’s a complicated idea.”

Even though the Trump administration has been rolling back regulations in an attempt to revive the coal industry, Justice said those efforts still come up short.

He said mining companies in Appalachia are spending more money to access hard to reach seams of coal and are in fierce competition with mines in Wyoming and Montana that are able to reach coal seams at less expense.

Justice, who said he’s also talked about the proposal with Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Vice President Pence and Trump adviser Jared Kushner, warned that the US is too dependent on natural gas to generate power.

He suggested the payments come from the Department of Homeland Security because it’s a national security issue.

If terrorists blew up gas pipelines or disrupted the supply of coal being shipped from mines in the west, Justice said the consequences could be catastrophic.

“Can you imagine what would happen if we lost the power in the east for a month, or two months, or three months?” he said. “It would be like a nuclear blast went off. You would lose hundreds of thousands of people. It would be just absolute chaos beyond belief.’’

He also rejected the idea that his plan amounts to a “bailout” or “subsidy” for the Appalachian coal industry.

But critics said Justice’s plan would be expensive.

Andrew Cosgrove, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said a payment of $15 for each of the 110 million tons of Appalachia coal burned by power plants in 2016 would cost at least $1.65 billion.

White House spokeswoman Kelly Love said there was nothing to announce at this time.