THE TRUTH ABOUT CHINESE COAL CONSUMPTION

China holds recoverable coal reserves estimated at 140–150 billion tonnes under the Energy Institute classification, ranking behind only the United States globally. It is simultaneously the world’s largest coal producer and the world’s largest coal consumer, accounting for 52–55 percent of total global coal use. In 2023, global coal demand stood at approximately 8.5–8.6 billion tonnes per annum; China alone consumed roughly 4.5–4.7 billion tonnes of that total — more than half the planet’s output passing through a single economy.

The 21st-century trajectory tells the story of a nation that tried restraint and abandoned it. Chinese coal production tripled between 2000 and 2013, plateaued briefly from 2014 to 2016 during a period of supply-side reform, resumed growth from 2017 to 2019, and then surged again after 2020 in what can only be described as a security-driven expansion. Output hit record levels above 4.6 billion tonnes per annum, and the expansion shows no sign of decelerating.

Western analysts have spent the better part of two decades expecting China to “transition away” from coal. The expectation is not merely wrong — it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how Beijing conceives of coal within its strategic architecture. The language of the 14th Five-Year Plan is unambiguous: coal is to serve as “the mainstay of the energy system”. The 2020 Energy Security White Paper goes further, declaring that China must “hold the energy rice bowl in its own hands” — a formulation that explicitly frames energy sovereignty as a precondition for national survival. These are not the words of a government managing an orderly decline.

The above excerpt is from this article: Beijing’s Excalibur: Coal as China’s Weapon of Sovereign Power