China is using more coal, gas, and oil than ever. They went from using 1.5 billion tons of thermal coal in 2000 to 4.6 Billion tons today and they will reach 4.7 Billion in 2027.
They did "pledge" to "limit increases" in coal, but there is a big difference from limiting increases to "moving away from" coal.
As for oil, it is a similar story. Oil use doubled from 2005 to 2025, but they pledged to "slow increases" of oil to something less than the 7% annual increases per year that were the last 10 years average (over the business cycle).
Natural gas has tripled from 3 to 9.3 billion cubic feet per day from 2014 to 2023.
The prescient part was building a pipeline to deliver oil and gas directly from Russia as well as building trade routes through Russia and the central Asian nations that give them a direct route to their energy suppliers (Including Iran, which can supply China without ever going through the straight of Hormuz).
Energy security is very important, and China has invested heavily to build pipelines and trade agreements that keep the oil and gas flowing, and they have moved away from buying Australian coal to increasing their own domestic coal production, reaching 4.8 Billion tons mined and on track to hit 5 Billion tons in the next few years.
Coal did not peak in 2024, but 2024 is the last year for which we have complete data, the other years are estimates.
This is how you get some people predicting drops of coal and natgas. You need to be very careful with recent data esp. from China as it takes time to collect data and you are usually 2 years behind.
But really stop and think - 2026 just started. Data from 2025 is now just coming in, and you are claiming that there was a "peak" in 2024. Even given the natural variability of this stuff across the business cycle, please, please know what you are doing with this stuff.
1. Measure from business cycle peak to business cycle peak
I have to laugh as progressively higher time derivatives are invoked to claim improvements. "The rate of increase in the deficit slowed this month" and the like.
Russia paid for the pipelines because they were desperate for customers in the post-2022 sanctions era. China has remarkably little ability to refine the crude domestically and they aren’t even using most of that domestic capacity.
Renewables... and coal. If shit hits fan it's not just hammering EVs (including trucking/freight) but hammering coal to liquid/olefin to make diesel and plastics. This not talked about much, long term strategic hedge / resource autarky looks like electrify everything, and domestic coal+oil for industry/petchem. If Hormuz long term, PRC going to be ramping up coal for industrial feedstock including fuels, even if it's much more polluting or expensive, but expensive is relative, $80 barrel oil = coal + extra processing becomes economical.
EU rollback on reducing gas liability, especially the widely debated rule on « no gas car after 2030 », feels now laughable. Maybe the reason why « technocrats » are good rulers is because they use science and data to do it.
The problem with the EU is that now they depend on rare earth minerals / solar panels / etc. for their infrastructure, which means more dependency on China. However, as the war unfolds, I bet the EU will certainly want to cozy up more with China than whatever the hell that is the Middle East and the US (and hell no they don't want to depend on Russia either!)
While depending on China for Solar panels is of course a liability, it's a very very different liability from relying on fossil fuel imports.
A solar panel has an effective lifetime of 20-30 years. A barrel of oil is literally set on fire.
If China stopped selling solar panels, there wouldnt be any energy crisis, just an inability to install *new* panels.
Same goes for the battery dependencies we have on Chinese imports.
Not a perfect situation of course, but there are some clever things the EU is doing about it. For instance, the recycling requirements is creating a local industry of people who intimately know all the components and construction of Chinese panels and batteries, and these people will be vital in kickstarting the domestic industry if China tries something. It also means that we're getting better and better at recovering rare earth minerals from decommissioned products, and we are building domestic reserves.
Rare earth minerals are often all over the place, they are just very messy to get to and that gets in the way of EU pollution regulations. China is not a sole producer - they are just cheap enough to make mining elsewhere not worth the hassle. That will change fast if they bottleneck the supply.
There's a big find in Norway, largest in Europa according to new estimates[1].
The updated estimate shows that the total rare earth oxide (TREO) content in the mapped resources (Indicated and Inferred) has increased from 8.8 million tonnes in 2024 to 15.9 million tonnes in 2026 – an increase of approximately 80 percent. For the first time, parts of the resource are also classified in the Indicated category, reflecting a higher degree of geological confidence
The WSP report further shows that the proportion of neodymium and praseodymium (NdPr) can be increased from approximately 17 to 19 percent of TREO. These REEs are regarded by the European Commission as the most critical raw materials in terms of supply risk and are important in the manufacturing of permanent magnets for EVs, green energy and defence.
There's no mine there yet though, and they haven't yet determined if it's economically viable. So yeah.
And once enough panels start nearing the end of their lifetime, it's likely that we should be able to recover nearly all the rare earth minerals from them with proper recycling. They don't actually get used up the way, say, fossil fuels do.
Solar panels contain negligible amounts of rare earths, compared to the amount used in wind / gas / steam turbines. They're also still used in oil & natural gas refining (though less than in the past).
Fossil fuel generators are most reliant on them, wind less so, solar barely at all.
Oh, I completely agree—but they're so frequently used as a gotcha for why the rise of solar is just trading one "foreign master" for another. "Oh no, solar panels rely on rare earth minerals, so that means you have to kowtow to China!!!"
And it's true that there is some in them, so it's good to have at least a long-term answer for how we deal with them.
Rare earth minerals are not consumed in the process of generating solar energy, whereas once you've burned your oil to generate energy, it's gone and you need to buy more. That makes a pretty damn major difference.
They did "pledge" to "limit increases" in coal, but there is a big difference from limiting increases to "moving away from" coal.
As for oil, it is a similar story. Oil use doubled from 2005 to 2025, but they pledged to "slow increases" of oil to something less than the 7% annual increases per year that were the last 10 years average (over the business cycle).
Natural gas has tripled from 3 to 9.3 billion cubic feet per day from 2014 to 2023.
The prescient part was building a pipeline to deliver oil and gas directly from Russia as well as building trade routes through Russia and the central Asian nations that give them a direct route to their energy suppliers (Including Iran, which can supply China without ever going through the straight of Hormuz).
Energy security is very important, and China has invested heavily to build pipelines and trade agreements that keep the oil and gas flowing, and they have moved away from buying Australian coal to increasing their own domestic coal production, reaching 4.8 Billion tons mined and on track to hit 5 Billion tons in the next few years.