It didn’t get much fanfare, but the Australian government’s Department of Industry, Energy and Resources (DISER) recently released an update to its big datasets that track Australia’s energy production, its imports, exports and fuel usage.
As always, it’s packed with numbers, but I found the coal production numbers interesting. Obviously COVID19 has impacted demand this year, and impacted the processes for extracting, transporting and selling coal.
A scrap between Australia and China has impacted coal too. But there are deeper, structural changes at play shifting coal demand globally. It has emphatically stopped climbing. What happens now is anyone’s guess. The International Energy Agency’s Coal report predicts stagnation. Global climate targets require a rapid decrease. We’ll see where we are in 2025….
