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China's post-coal growth

Nature Geoscience volume 9, pages 564–566 (2016)Cite this article

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Slowing GDP growth, a structural shift away from heavy industry, and more proactive policies on air pollution and clean energy have caused China's coal use to peak. It seems that economic growth has decoupled from growth in coal consumption.

The timing of China's peak coal consumption has been disputed, with a majority of projections now placing it between 2020 and 20404. Yet China's coal use dropped to 4.12 billion tons, a decrease of 2.9%, in 2014, with another 3.6% decrease in 2015, all while gross domestic product (GDP) continued to grow by 7.3% and 6.9% respectively. There are ambiguities in the accuracy of China's coal use data5,6, which have implications for China's energy and emissions policy. However, the government has retrospectively revised statistics on the basis of more accurate accounting; these values are used here and refer to the raw volume of coal use. Calorific value data, released later in 2013, show that consumption growth was roughly flat. 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.

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Figure 1

© ALEX SEGRE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Figure 2: China's economy, primary energy and coal consumption (setting 1980 values as 100), and their respective growth rates.
Figure 3: Historical trajectories of economic development and coal consumption for the United Kingdom, the United States and China (data normalized for comparison; note differences in values on both axes).

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Author information

Affiliations

  1. School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Ye Qi & Tong Wu

  2. Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Ye Qi & Jiaqi Lu

  3. Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK

    Nicholas Stern & Fergus Green

  4. ecoSERVICES Group, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, 85287, Arizona, USA

    Tong Wu

Authors
  1. Ye Qi
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  2. Nicholas Stern
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  3. Tong Wu
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  4. Jiaqi Lu
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  5. Fergus Green
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tong Wu.

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Qi, Y., Stern, N., Wu, T. et al. China's post-coal growth. Nature Geosci 9, 564–566 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2777

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