China’s coal consumption has steadily decreased by a few percentage points a year since 2013, prompting our pronouncement of a coal consumption peak in an article published in the summer of 2016 in Nature Geoscience.

This declaration was echoed quickly by Zhang Guobao, former minister of the National Energy Administration, who went further to suggest that the government make an official announcement on the coal peak.

However, in 2017, the beast of coal seemed to be quite untamed. Coal prices rose sharply, production and consumption went up, and the coal inventory was in sharp decline. Coal consumption appears to have made a quick rebound.

In a recent report by the Global Carbon Project published during COP 23 – the informal name for the 23rd Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – the authors predicted a 3 percent increase of coal consumption in China, leading to a 3.5 percent increase in China’s carbon emissions, a key contributor to a 2 percent increase of global emissions in 2017.

Many are concerned about the robustness of China’s energy decarbonization and its implication for climate change.

Find out more about China's coal consumption by Qi Ye and Jiaqi Lu at Brookings