Academics Ye Qi, Jiaqi Lu and Tong Wu of Beijing’s Tsinghua University and Nicholas Stern and Fergus Green from the London School of Economics and Political Science said in Nature Geoscience this week that China’s coal use had “peaked”
They cited slowing GDP growth, a structural shift away from heavy industry and more proactive policies on air pollution and clean energy as the cause of this conclusion.
While the timing of China’s peak coal consumption has been disputed, with a majority of projections now placing it between 2020 and 2040, the academics noted China’s coal use dropped to 4.12 billion tonnes, a decrease of 2.9%, in 2014, with another 3.6% decrease in 2015 – all while GDP continued to grow by 7.3% and 6.9% respectively.
China’s coal use data is notorious for its ambiguities, which has implications for China’s energy and emissions policy.
However, the academics believe government has retrospectively revised statistics on the basis of more accurate accounting – values the academics used to refer to the raw volume of coal use.
“Calorific value data, released later in 2013, shows consumption growth was roughly flat,” the academics said.
“If the volume figures take into account the fact that higher-quality coal was burned, 2014 is more likely to be the year of peak coal consumption.
“For the long-term perspective, it is not important whether the peak year was in 2013 or 2014: what matters is the reversal in the trend.
“The decoupling of growth in the economy and growth in coal use has raised the important question of whether this is just a temporary dip, or a turning point that indicates that peak coal consumption has already arrived.
“We argue that China’s coal consumption has indeed reached an inflection point much sooner than expected, and will decline henceforth – even though coal will remain the primary source of energy for the coming decades. We suggest that China has entered the era of post-coal growth.”
Commenting on the new research, Stern was quoted in The Guardian, which is on a crusade to urge corporate divestment of fossil fuel investments, as saying China was at a “real turning point”
“I think historians really will see [the coal peak of] 2014 as a very important event in the history of the climate and economy of the world,” he said.
