The Cabinet’s planning agency warned in August that 20 regions had exceeded energy use and pollution targets after manufacturing rebounded from the pandemic. The government has ambitious plans to make the economy cleaner and more energy-efficient, so failing to meet those targets can be a career-ending blunder.
AP
While no one was looking China was running out of coal.
The different coloured lines are predictions of future coal production by various Chinese academics. The red line is the author’s preferred prediction, which has a broad top about 20 years long. The profile predicted is consistent with vigorous exploitation of a finite resource. Now, in 2021, we are right at the peak of forecast Chinese coal production with another six or seven years of plateau — before production plunges at much the same rate that it rose at.
That graph shows that China’s domestic coal production peaked in 2012. It looks like the top is in. China would produce more domestic coal if they could. The fact that they don’t means that they can’t. Ten years ago in the eastern coal province of Shandong, underground coal mines were at an average depth of 675 metres, more than halfway to their final depth of 1,200 metres. Operating costs tend to start rising strongly when a resource is more than half-depleted. Notably, Chinese coal miners have complained that they cannot compete with imported coal on price. Imports have risen to 300 million tonnes per annum, mainly from Mongolia, Indonesia and before it was banned, Australia.
David Archibald
Now not just China but the whole world is in a bidding war for ‘fossil fuels’. The scarcity was easy to predict. When you discourage something there is less of it. The lights will stay on in rich precincts but it’s lights outs for the poor.
The minor mystery is how momentous trends like the real estate bubble and the power crisis can stay lurking unnoticed below the fold for so long. But nobody saw the fall of the USSR, 9/11, the GFC, Brexit or Covid coming either.