The photo is sourced from intellinews.com
The increased investments in coal mining are aimed at reducing dependence on coal imports, which make a major contribution to balancing the Chinese market during periods of high demand. According to the IEA, the share of imports in China’s power-generating coal consumption in 2023 stood at 9% (351 million tons out of 4,002 million tons) and made up 14% of demand for coking coal (100 million tons out of 738 million tons). At the same time, China continues to expand the infrastructure for the use of coal in the power and metallurgical industries. Global Energy Monitor reports that the country had 1,155 coal-fired TPPs with a total capacity of 1,137 gigawatts (GW) in operation by January 2024, with another 126 power plants totaling 140 GW under construction. As for basic oxygen furnaces using coking coal in the steelmaking process, their aggregate capacity totaled 832 million tons per year by April 2024, while projects totaling another 43 million tons of steel per year were being actively implemented.
Over half of China’s coal supply was provided by the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the north of the country and the adjacent Shanxi Province: in 2023, coal production in these regions totaled 2,143 million tons; one-fourth of supply came from Shaanxi Province (626 million tons) in central China and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwestern China (368 million tons). According to Global Energy Monitor, by April 2024 these four regions were preparing for production a number of mines and open pits with a total capacity of 341 million tons per year, which exceeds the current volume of coal production in the European Union (276 million tons in 2023). Another relatively large coal-producing region is the southwestern province of Guizhou, which accounted for 2% of domestic coal production in 2023, as well as 4% of the capacity of mines and open pits at the investment stage.
Over the past years, China has remained not only the world’s largest coal producer, but also the leader in the pace of development of new coal mining projects: in the period from 2015 to 2023, a total of 222 new coal mines and open pits were put into operation in China, compared to 121 mines in the rest of the world. The launch of new capacities made it possible to produce 1,074 million tons of coal in 2015–2023 versus 501 million tons produced in the other countries of the world. This ratio is very likely to persist in the near future, including due to the phasing out of coal in Europe and North America, which, as of early 2024, had projects totaling only 66 million tons in annual capacity undergoing preparations for the start of coal mining (versus 394 million tons per year in China).
