World Coal Market: Current State and Long-Term Trends

This paper aims to identify major trends in the evolution of the global coal market in the 21st century. The relevance of the topic stems from the fact that under the Paris Climate Agreement many countries are committed to reduce fossil fuel production, and this is likely to have an impact on global coal production and on international trade flows. To analyse the dynamics and structural changes in global coal production the author uses International Energy Agency data and fill in existing gaps with statistics provided by Euracoal database. The main findings suggest that during 2000–2023 the global coal production has almost doubled, mainly due to the contribution of Asian counties – China, India and Indonesia, being now the largest world exporters of coal. The share of exports in the total world production tended to enlarge from 13% in 2000 to 17% in 2023. While Russia constantly accounts for 5% of the global coal production, it ranks third among the largest coal exporters with a share that grew from 6% in 2000 to 15% in 2023. Fundamental changes have occurred in the geographical structure of world imports. The combined share of China and India expanded during the period 2000‒2023 from 3 to 46%, whereas the combined share of the EU and Japan dropped from 50 to 18%. Meanwhile the global coal market is moving to Asia, its already high grade of geographical concentration is still building up. These trends are typical for production, exports and imports (although to a somewhat lesser extent). The share of the five largest exporters climbed from 62% in 2000 to 82% in 2023, and the share of five largest importers grew from 64 to 72%, respectively.