Fitch Solutions Tuesday said India’s thermal coal output is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 4.3 percent by 2028.
“In absolute volume terms, China and India will have the largest impact on the global coal market balance,” Fitch Solutions Macro Research said in a report.
It further said the surge in Chinese imports that occurred over 2015-2017 as a result of dramatic domestic production curbs was a temporary phenomenon.
“We forecast thermal coal production in China to stagnate at 0.5 percent growth per annum from 2019 onwards, but not decline, as new coal mines in Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces offset mine closures in the rest of the country,” it said.
It further estimates that production by state-owned Coal India (CIL) — which accounts for around 90 percent of domestic output — will underwhelm the government expectations.
“We forecast India’s thermal coal output to grow by an average annual rate of 4.3 percent over 2019-2028,” it said.
Along with weaker Chinese and Indian demand, South Korea and Japan will also see coal consumption slowing down in 2019 due to heightening environmental concerns, it added.
“We maintain our thermal coal price forecast for 2019 at [$85/ton] as our previous belief that prices will be pressured downwards in 2019 due to lower seaborne demand from China and India, while global production will remain buoyant, is playing out,” the report noted.
Read more at Press Trust Of India
We forget that up to the 50’s houses had coal bins and everyone burned coal for heat. It was a revolution to transition so many houses to natural gas and electricity. Reliable sources of energy that the Greens are making unreliable. It doesn’t have to be like that. Burn the darn coal in large efficient and “clean” (with scrubbers) powerplants.
Doing the math, a 4.3% increase per year until 2028 is a 46% increase above current levels. It is ironic that this is just two years before the artificial deadline of 2030 for many of the action plants of the climate change movement. This is just one example how no matter what California, New York, the UK, or Ireland does on climate change, carbon dioxide emissions will continue to rise at a rapid rate. Yet, the citizens of the states and counties that take action will suffer just the same.
Note that this article is about Indian and Chinese domestic coal production. They import coal, too, from countries that don’t burn it themselves, like Canada.
Coal is great stuff, abundant and cheap. Modern coal plants produce almost nothing but CO2; the precious, life-giving, beneficial, trace gas that makes all our lives better.
$85/ton of coal? Gimme a train load! We’d a month into spring and it’s frikkin cold!