Has China reached peak coal?

Coal use in China — the world’s largest consumer of coal — peaked in 2013–2014 and is now set to decline, argues a commentary published online in Nature Geoscience this week.

Tong Wu and colleagues at Tsinghua University, Beijing, attribute the sooner-than-expected peak, which comes at lower per-capita gross domestic product than that for the peak coal consumption in the United Kingdom and the United States, to three main factors: slower economic growth, a decline in coal-intensive industries and environmental policies. They conclude that coal will continue to be an important energy source for the Chinese economy for the foreseeable future, but that China’s economic growth and improving living standards are no longer coupled to rising coal consumption.

China, as the world’s largest consumer of coal, currently accounts for 50% of global demand, having a worldwide impact economically and environmentally. According to the researchers, between 2000 and 2013, consumption rose from 1.36 billion tons to over 4.24 billion tons, at an average annual rate of 12%, but since coal use is also a significant source of CO₂ emissions and air pollution, China has come under increasing international and domestic pressures to reach peak emissions, causing China to adopt a strategy of moving the economy away from coal dependency.

Many argue that China’s peak coal consumption will be between 2020 and 2040, yet China’s coal use dropped to 4.12 billion tons, a decrease of 2.9%, in 2014, with another 3.6% decrease in 2015, all while gross domestic product (GDP) continued to grow by 7.3% and 6.9% respectively.

Calorific value data released in 2013 also shows that consumption growth was roughly flat. If the volume figures take into account the fact that higher quality coal was burned, the researchers claim that 2014 is more likely to be the year of peak coal consumption, showing a reversal in the trend.

There is still a question of whether this is just a temporary dip or a turning point that indicates that peak coal consumption has already arrived. The researchers believe that China’s coal consumption has indeed reached an inflection point much sooner than expected and will decline from now on.

An in-depth commentary by the researchers can be read here.