The economic problems are that once a location reliant on extractive industries gets too expensive (and / or gets automated leading to orders of magnitude cuts to the necessary workforce) it's not coming back, the companies either fold or leave. Europe has coal countries which folded a century ago. Once your coal is too far to be cheaply extractible, even if new tech made extracting it viable once again it almost certainly would not need anywhere near the same level of crewing. And reactivating an old mine is probably not worth the cost over upgrading mines which are still active.

So your only "fixes" are to flee the area or move to a new industry. And to do the latter, you need a way to kickstart the change. That's the goal of federal grants.

The recovery of extractive areas is difficult, and may not even be possible if too dependent. And it certainly does not happen by clinging to the extractive industry which left you behind.