Coal is in the pits, despite US President Donald Trump’s promise to rekindle the world’s dirtiest energy source.
A new from the International Energy Agency reveals that global demand for coal slumped by 4.2 per cent over the past two years. That nearly equals the largest drop since the IEA started compiling statistics 40 years ago; a two-year decline in the early 1990s.
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If current trends continue, coal’s share of the global power supply will fall below 36 per cent by 2022. That will also be the lowest since IEA statistics began.
Thanks to lower gas prices, surging installation of renewable energy and improvements in energy efficiency, global consumption of coal fell by 2 per cent last year, to 5357 million tonnes of coal equivalent.
In Europe, renewable energy accounted for 86 per cent of newly-installed capacity for electricity generation in 2016, according to by the European Environment Agency. Worldwide, it says, renewables were 62 per cent of newly-installed capacity.
Power shift
“These two reports indicate that there’s a fundamental shift underway in the global power sector, with coal becoming increasingly unattractive for electricity generation because of its high emissions of greenhouse gases and local air pollution,” says of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in London. “However, this transition to low-carbon power needs to accelerate across the world if we’re to meet the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to well below 2 °°ä.”
Coal demand dropped in China for the third year running. This came after Chinese premier Li Keqiang pledged to “make the skies blue again”, following years of catastrophic smogs and pollution in Chinese cities. But China is still a major driver of global coal use, says the IEA. Coal is tipped to supply 55 per cent of China’s energy demand in 2022.
Low gas prices and growth of renewables helped drive down coal use in the USA. In the UK, demand for coal dropped by 50 per cent last year, making UK emissions of carbon dioxide the lowest since the 19th century.
However, demand is rising in India, with coal-fired power generation expected to rise by 4 per cent per year through to 2022. Coal demand is also tipped to quadruple between 2016 and 2022 in Pakistan, which has rich reserves of dirty lignite coal.
The IEA warns that despite the stagnation in coal use, further investment is needed in carbon capture, utilisation and storage technologies to trap and re-use carbon dioxide emissions from facilities that burn coal. “Without this technology, coal use will be seriously constrained in the future,” says of the IEA.
