According to IEA global coal demand is expected to increase for the second year in a row in 2018, and remain stable over the next five years as declines in Europe and North America are offset by strong increase in India and Southeast Asia.
Namely, because of the environmental restrictions, coal divestment campaigns, phase-out announcements, declining costs of renewables and abundant supplies of natural gas there is a pressure on coal. As a result, coal’s contribution to the global energy mix is forecast to decline slightly from 27% in 2017 to 25% by 2023.
Moreover, coal demand is bigger in Asia due to its affordability and availability. Yet, India experiences the largest increase, although the rate of growth by 3.9% per year, is slowing, affected by a large-scale expansion of renewables and the use of supercritical technology in new coal power plants.
Significant increases in coal use are also expected in Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia and Pakistan.
In China, coal reaches 14% of global primary energy. Developments in the Chinese coal sector have the possibility to affect coal, gas and electricity prices across the world. This will place China’s coal sector at the centre of the coal stage globally, as IEA stated.
In addition, IEA expects Chinese coal demand to decrease by around 3% over the period.
IEA supports technologies like Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage as crucial factors to bridge current and future energy needs with global and national climate ambitions.
In support of new technologies, IEA and the Government of the UK recently co-chaired an international summit where ministers, senior governmental officials across the world, CEOs from major energy companies and the financial community came together to identify practical steps to accelerate investment and deployment of CCUS.
