Liam Denning, Columnist

Coal Isn’t Safe Even in Its Asian Fortress

China and India account for much of the fuel’s global use, but alternatives are growing there.

June 14, 2018 at 5:26 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

A coal miner works on coal seams in an open pit coal mine on August 19, 2006 in Chifeng of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China.
Photographer: China Photos/Getty Images AsiaPac

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BP’s latest review of the world’s appetite for energy, published this week, contained a startling chart indicating that coal’s grip on electricity generation has not changed in 20 years. I wrote yesterday on how, while true at a headline level, there were clear signs of a shift occurring at the margin when you looked at growth in different types of power generation rather than just absolute totals.

That becomes even clearer when you back out the big two growth markets: China and India.