IEA Warns Coal Use Set to Surpass Oil in Decade
Coal is set to surpass oil as the world's top fuel within a decade, driven by growth in emerging market giants China and India, according to a report published Tuesday.
Economic growth is expected to push up the share of coal, which produces the most climate-changing gasses, in the global energy mix, "and if no changes are made to current policies, coal will catch oil within a decade," said Maria van der Hoeven, head of the International Energy Agency, in a statement.
The latest IEA projections see coal consumption nearly catching oil consumption in four years time, rising to 4.32 billion tons of oil equivalent in 2017 against 4.4 billion tons for oil.
That has consequences for climate change as coal produces far more carbon emissions responsible for global warming than other fuels.
The IEA, the energy advisory arm of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development of 34 industrialized nations, sees non-OECD developing countries as driving the increase in coal consumption due to population growth and rising electricity consumption as their economies grow and modernize.
In its baseline scenario, the IEA sees rapid increases in power generation making India the second-largest coal consumer in 2017, displacing the United States where the shale gas boom makes coal uncompetitive.
Chinese coal consumption is forecast to account for more than half of global demand by 2014, with the country also displacing the United States as the biggest coal polluter on a per-capita basis.
The IEA sees China's coal demand increasing by an average of 3.7 percent per year to 3,190 million tons of coal equivalent in 2017.
Even in the case of a slowdown in the breakneck growth in the Chinese economy the IEA sees the country's use of coal growing by 2 percent per year, as well as the overall coal market growing.
The agency said that given its position developments in the Chinese market would largely determine the course of the global coal market, saying: "China is coal. Coal is China."
Source: Agence France Presse
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