Oh yes, no doubt that China is a significant net importer from now on. However, I'm not sure they will ever import as much as last year again, that was probably a one off confluence of events. I've heard people in the freight industry say it was as high as 400m Mtns, but they must have been counting coal shipped between Chinese ports I think. Still, an unbelievable feat of logistics.

The really big news in coal and source of massive demand growth is India. They are already taking a big share of RBCT exports (South Africa), once the bedrock of European imports, and their consumption growth has way further to go and Indian coal reserves are much poorer in quality and quantity than Chinese.

Most of this extra coal will come from Indonesia, but some will also come from displacing European imports which will in turn increase Europe's dependence on gas.

"Chinese coal monster" is apt.

We Americans aren't slouches in the coal-burning department, but the Chinese will burn
3x more than we will this year.

To visualize the scale of their coal burning (and mining!), think of a train 1,000 miles long, composed of 100,000 hopper cars heaped with coal.

That's how much they are burning.

Each day.

RIP

The charts are difficult to relate to the text.
The text speaks of about 3 billion tons/yr usage, the export import data shows fluctuations within the 100mm tons/yr range, basically a rounding error either way.
The issue is presumably that China will need to grow its coal supply to maintain its economic growth and at 10%/yr growth, China will need to import 300mm tons/yr next year, 600mm tons/yr the year after, unless their domestic production can be increased to keep pace.
It certainly suggests that the current effort to curb CO2 emissions via the US Cap and Trade bill would be unlikely to do much .

With China importing more and more coal will it mean it may be more profitable for those coal trains out of Powder River to go to west coast ports than to continuing to ship it east? Our electric bills are going to go higher no matter what we do just to keep the coal at home. With the cost of using coal going up then renewables will become more competitive.

The comment about rounding errors above is apt. I expect that the China yearbook data is perhaps more 'correct' than the BP data but remember that all of these numbers will get updated when next year's compilations come out.

To get a sense of the main coal consumers and providers for the region and, more importantly, to see what the existing trends are, here are some telling graphs from the Energy Export databrowser.

(Note the difference in scale for each graph.)

China and India are the top two coal consumers in Asia but have been mostly self-sufficient. India has imported a significant percentage of its coal for just the last decade.

Japan and South Korea are no slouches either but must import essentially all of their coal. (Taiwan is next and imports about 40 million tonnes oil equiv. per year according to BP. Germany (surprise!) it the next largest importer after Taiwan.)

The primary Asia-Pacific exporters of coal are Indonesia and Australia. (South Africa is also a major exporter to India.)

It's worth taking a look at the trends in all of the countries that produce or consume coal. Columbia, for example, has ramped from zero production to South African levels of exports in just 25 years. If China and India become major importers will Columbia's production rocket upwards like Indonesia's?

There is no doubt that Asia is, as it always has been, primarily powered by coal. In the last decade coal has become even more important as seen in the graph below for the entire Asia-Pacific region:

Although China is the #1 consumer of coal in the world I think it is perhaps more appropriate to refer to the Asian Coal Monster when referring to net imports. With increasing populations desirous of higher standards of living the demand for energy can only go up. With oil becoming more expensive and renewables still unable to meet demand the only options are natural gas and coal.

It is still unclear to me whether we will see production bottlenecks in the next decade for LNG. But it seems obvious that coal production and consumption have nowhere to go but up barring a huge setback for economies all across Asia. I think the recent Patzek article on peak coal will be proven wrong by the time the decade is out.

Not much chance here for reducing carbon emissions I'm sorry to say.

Best Hopes for Hope!

Jon

This is yet another post making it clear that U.S. attempts to reduce emissions through mandates and subsidies is futile. Our energy policy should have only one goal.

Develop clean safe reliable dispatchable energy sources that are cheaper than burning coal

SHORT TERM STRATEGY

1 Drill, drill, drill. Each $10 per barrel that oil goes up costs Americans another $80 billion per year. Each 1 cent per kWh that electricity goes up costs Americans another $40 billion per year.

We need fuel to keep our economy going so that we can afford to develop the new technologies that the world needs.

2 Level the playing field so that we are forced to pay the true cost of energy from each source. Eliminate all energy subsidies.

When you take a load of trash to the city landfill you pay a fee per pound of trash. Humans have been using the atmosphere as a free waste dump since we gained control of fire. Atmospheric dumping of hazardous material is producing severe adverse effects on human health and global climate. We should charge an atmospheric dumping fee equal to the best estimate of the cost of damage done by the toxic waste being injected into our atmosphere. Low emission technologies will become more competitive on a level playing field.

INTERMEDIATE TERM STRATEGY

Use proven technology to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

1 Accelerate the mainstreaming of emerging technologies including hybrid, battery and fuel cell vehicles.

2 Mass produce floating nuclear power plants to increase our supply of clean emissions free electricity. A company called Offshore Power Systems built a facility to do that in Florida during the seventies, but it was never put into production due to a downturn in the economy that stalled growth and canceled orders.

http://www.atomicinsights.com/aug96/Offshore.html

3 Convert most stationary applications of natural gas to electricity. Use our natural gas supply to displace imported oil. Automakers can make dual fuel vehicles, gasoline / natural gas, quickly and cheaply.

LONG TERM STRATEGY

1 Increase R&D for energy by more than a factor of ten to $100 billion per year, 90 cents per day for each of us. Push every technology as hard as possible, build prototypes of everything as it becomes possible and publish the performance data.

Let the marketplace decide which new technology to build on a level playing field.

When someone says R&D most people only hear “Research”. In truth Development is the really expensive part, and the U.S. has done very little of that in recent decades.

Build intermediate scale plants of all promising technologies, advanced nuclear, cellulosic biofuel, algae, solar power, geothermal, coal with full sequestration. For those technologies that are successful in medium scale we should built at least one full scale commercial size plant.

We have yet to build a fully sequestered coal plant after years of talk. We need to try even if the first plant is a failure.

There are dozens of ways to split a uranium atom. What are the odds that a steroidal submarine reactor is the best? There are huge improvements to be made in nuclear power plant design and construction, yet we have not built a new experimental power reactor since 1973.

The road of progress is paved with stones of failure. By spending 90 cents per person per day to push every technology as fast as possible, the best technologies and breakthroughs, whatever they are, will emerge as leaders in the shortest possible time. 95% of that money will probably be wasted on unsuccessful technology, but that is cheap insurance to assure that we get the best solution. Relying on a bunch of gray haired law school graduates in Washington to cherry pick technology is a formula for disaster.

The new technologies will tend to suppress rising energy costs. I believe the savings could surpass the annual R&D cost within 15 – 20 years, and save over $2,000 per year per person within 30 years, not to mention a large improvement in the environment and quality of life with this approach. 100 years from now energy will be cheap, clean and abundant.

A big R&D push will provide the U.S. with new products that are highly desirable all over the world, providing Americans with high paying manufacturing jobs and products to sell overseas to eliminate our trade deficit and strengthen the dollar.

So the suggestion of replacing ever-more-scarce oil with coal is probably not a good idea.

And perhaps more significant, the competition for both oil and coal may become quite fierce.

Doesn't look good.

I've stated before that I don't think China will go much higher with its domestic production but that will remain flat going forward.
The real question concerns Chinese coal imports from nearby Siberian and Mongolian deposits(100 billion tons?).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-mining_region#cite_note-4

The Russian deposits (a 6 trillion ton resource)are graded differently than US coal so they may be larger as prices rise--- once other fossil fuels become exhausted.

http://www.mma1.com/company/pdf/papers/An%20Introduction%20of%20the%20Ru...

Who other than coal-loving China will use these remote deposits?

The same countries that promised action on climate change are now rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of selling more coal to China. I'd liken it to teaching Sunday School on weekends and turning tricks mid week. I think there should be an export levy of fossil fuels so we all get used to paying more and finding alternatives. Thus thermal coal from Australia current spot price around $100 a tonne should be slapped with a levy of $50. That's 2.5 X $20 per tonne of CO2.

Similar levies could apply to crude oil, oil from tar sands, piped gas and LNG. The importing country eg China could ask for a refund of the levy if they promised to spend it on green tech, but mostly the 50% price shock should make them think about alternatives. Countries like Australia that actively assist coal exports have zero credibility on climate change. They are liars and hypocrites. The good news is that Australia's coal exports to all countries of 260 million tonnes a year can't save China's 3,000 million tonne habit.

In fact I wonder if the conjunction of Global Peak Oil and China Peak Coal could be a turning point for the low carbon transition. It could emerge just in the next few years.

While I agree that China's coal balance is certainly important, my work in the data over the past decade--especially in the relative positions between coal and oil--suggests that China's unique, energy adoption pathway offers the most insights. I would argue that China's impact on the global coal trade has its more notable start back in 2002.

Demand revisions that appeared in the latest release of BP Stat Review (for previous years), in the area of coal, were indeed a bit bigger than in the previous year. Developing world coal consumption was dialed back slightly in the revision(s), and oil consumption was increased a little.

China's demand growth for coal is indeed supersonic, but alot of this a reflection of the fact that China is just a place where the world get's alot of its work done. As for the data, I take the approach that more is better, and I have no reason to privilege one group over the other.

G

I was in Mongolia a few years back rummaging around uranium prospects and what struck me was the vast coal deposits that lack transport infrastructure to China. Both steaming and coking coal. At least 100 MT could go to China per annum without much fuss.

US coal consumption as a percentage of production was at 85% in 1980 and at 96% in 2008 (EIA). At this long term rate of increase, the US would be a net coal importer, on a tonnage basis, by 2020. The EIA used to calculate net coal exports/imports on a BTU basis, which attempted to take into account differences in BTU's per ton, which of course varies considerably for various grades of coal, but they have changed to tons.

Here is the net coal export chart for the US (EIA). 2008 net coal exports were 4.3% of production.

Here is the EIA's net coal export chart for China). 2008 net coal exports were 0.6% of production.

Once more, I drop by to to remind that the chess game is essentially over.

The U.S. could stop every automobile on its highways and burn them where they stand, and it will have essentially no effect on the growth of Greenhouse Gas production worldwide. And the effect we can have is becoming less of the total with each passing day. The U.S., Japan, and Europe could essentially assasinate their own economies and the the developing world would swallow up the amount of carbon release improvements in the next decade. Have you ever seen a child playing chess? They enjoy the game, so even after checkmate they will want to keeping playing the same game..."can we just keep moving?" It is an informative lesson...but we should be grown ups. The game is done, checkmate. Time to start a new argument, a new game, a new paradigm.

RC

No idea if this has been posted anywhere on TOD before, apologies if it's old news:

A global coal production forecast with multi-Hubbert cycle analysis by Tadeusz W. Patzek and Gregory D. Croft

The global peak of coal production from existing coalfields is predicted to occur close to the year 2011. The peak coal production rate is 160 EJ/y, and the peak carbon emissions from coal burning are 4.0 Gt C (15 Gt CO_2 ) per year. After 2011, the production rates of coal and CO_2 decline, reaching 1990 levels by the year 2037, and reaching 50% of the peak value in the year 2047. It is unlikely that future mines will reverse the trend predicted in this BAU scenario.