- China accounts for over half of global coal production.
- Just six countries produce nearly 90% of the world’s coal.
- Asia dominates both total output and recent production growth.
China produces more coal than all nations combined.
According to the 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy, China produced 4.78 billion tonnes of coal in 2024, accounting for 51.7% of the global total.
Coal production is also highly concentrated beyond China. The top six producing countries, including India, Indonesia, and the U.S., together account for 87% of total supply.
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India ranks second at just over 1 billion tonnes, but its 11.7% share is far behind China’s majority.
The top six is rounded out by Indonesia (9.0%), the United States (5.0%), Australia (5.0%), and Russia (4.6%), after which production drops off sharply.
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I’ll agree it’s not. However (and I’m normally a critic of China when applicable) they produce all the bullshit we all buy so they have a ridiculous energy demand. 31% of the world’s electricity is consumed in China, but AFAIK coal is also used in production of steel and other metals.
This is equivalent to that statement that goes around saying that 100 companies produce 70% of the world’s CO2. Yes, it’s true, but they don’t drill oil or burn coal for the lulz, it’s all to satisfy some consumer demand down the line. In the big picture, we all share some of the blame, though obviously us individuals can only control our individual consumption whereas China can control how much power they get from which source.
@boonhet@sopuli.xyz
I wrote this in the last few days in other threads: It does NOT satisfy consumer demands.
China produces massive overcapacity in almost all industries. For example, it produces more steel that can be absorbed by global markets, and the same is true for solar panels and many other products. The resulting price wars have been leading to bankruptcies (more than 400 EV makers filed for insolvency or halted production since the late 2010s, for example) and a deflationary period since 2023.
The Chinese government wants to export this model to the world for geopolitical reasons, not to ‘satisfy demand’. The government in Beijing doesn’t care about demand or the people who are about to suffer most from this in the long run.
Addition:
China heavily depends on foreign exports markets to sell this overcapacity, as one analysis says,
The Chinese Communist Party does not necessarily aim at undermining national welfare, but it at least deliberately accepts it, and it aims to export the same model to as many countries as possible.
I don’t disagree about them dumping low cost goods on everyone else to drive competitors out of business and in fact I’ve argued before that they’re doing that with their EV subsidies, however…
Look at everything you own. What percentage of it is made in China, or made out of components or materials from China? All of that is part of Chinese energy/CO2. In the west we can claim we’re moving towards emitting less CO2, sure… But a large part of it comes from having outsourced most of our manufacturing to China and other low-cost countries (China being the cheap place for high-tech stuff, some other Asian countries being the cheap place for low-tech stuff since they have even cheaper labor than China, whereas China has amassed expertise in building things like consumer electronics).
Personally I think my car’s just about the only product I own that’s not made in China or made of majority Chinese-manufactured components and that’s just because it’s about two decades old and the Germans were still doing a lot of things in Germany at that point. The same OE suppliers (ZF, Bosch, etc) have now moved a lot of their production to China too, so now in 2026 even if you buy a German car manufactured in Germany, it’ll have more Chinese parts on it than it would have had a few decades ago. Okay, sure, the CPU and GPU of my PC and the SoC on my phone are not from China, but they’re from TSMC, so that’s still something we enjoy here in Europe en masse without the energy cost affecting our numbers. I also checked and my mouse and keyboard both hail from China.
My point isn’t that China is innocent in all this, but that we aren’t exactly being fair when looking at these numbers most of the time.
Also if they’re flooding the world with cheap solar panels, by all means, go for it. They’re still pretty costly where I come from, so clearly there’s room to go even lower with the price.