Coal Use Hits Record High, Despite Clean Energy Boom

Coal use reached a record high of 8.3billion metric tons in 2022, providing about 36 percent of the world’s electricity generation, despite an uptick in the demand for clean energy sources.
As global economies grappled with energy security following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China and India responded by boosting their coal industries, which overshadowed a decrease in coal usage in the United States and the European Union.
Transitioning India and China away from coal is estimated to cost around a trillion dollars, but it is crucial for achieving global emission goals; however, political complications and the countries’ relationships with coal make this task daunting.
For years, climate experts have been begging the world’s biggest economies to wean themselves off of fossil fuels. Instead, coal use is at an all time high, hitting a brand new record of 8.3 billion metric tons in 2022, up 3.3 percent from the prior year, according to figures from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The uptick in coal demand has been concurrent with a clean energy boom, as countries across the world turned to non-petroleum based energy sources with thanks to soaring oil and gas prices.
All told, the world produced 10,440 terawatt hours from coal in 2022 – about 36 percent of the world’s electricity generation.
Russia’s war in Ukraine, which kicked off an entirely war over energy supply and sanctions in Europe over the course of 2022, sent shockwaves through global energy markets.
To shore up energy security, global economies scrambled to find alternative energy supply chains. In the West, this mostly manifested as an intensive growth in the renewable energy sector. In China and India, however, the coal business is booming.
The picture is a bit more complex in China, however, where renewables growth has outpaced every other country on earth several times over, but coal still reigns supreme in the global energy mix.
As a result, “by region, coal demand fell faster than previously expected in the first half of this year in the United States and the European Union — by 24 percent and 16 percent, respectively”, the IEA said in a statement accompanying its Coal Market Update report.
“However, demand from the two largest consumers, China and India, grew by over 5 percent during the first half, more than offsetting declines elsewhere”.
Historically, China and India have both been major opponents of climate agreements insisting on the phaseout of coal.
At the 2021 United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, China and India imposed a last-minute intervention to water down the language in the conference Pact, so that the parties agreed to “phase down” rather than “phase out” coal.
In his speech at a Conference Proceedings, India’s Environment Minister, Bhupender Yadav, said, “how can anyone expect that developing countries make promises about phasing out coal and fossil fuels subsidies. Developing countries still have to deal with their poverty reduction agenda”.
Indeed, leaving coal behind is a politically complicated imperative for the twin giants of India and China. India has been a particularly vocal critic of the fact that developed nations, who have enriched themselves off of unmitigated and impune fossil fuel usage, are now calling the shots for the global decarbonisation movement and instructing still-developing nations that they are not allowed to do the same. Indian officials have urged rich countries to look in the mirror and scale back their own energy use before pointing the finger at less developed economies.
If a single refrigerator in the U.S. uses more energy in a year than the average individual does in a developing country, they say, then maybe that should be the real focus of climate talks.
For Beijing, coal is also extremely political, but for different reasons. In China, coal is synonymous with energy security – the primary if not singular energy goal of the Xi Jinping administration. When other forms of power have failed

By: Haley Zaremba
Zaremba writes for oilprice.com.