Solid fuels. Coal - Economics and Resources

Global coal consumption has risen dramatically over the last decade. This is due to the growing energy needs of emerging Asian economies (particularly China and India), which have led to a shift in the center of gravity of coal markets, now dominated by Asia. While it was thought that this energy from another century would disappear from the world's energy balance, the reality is quite different: coal currently accounts for 28% of the world's primary energy needs. This is due to its specific uses in the steel industry, and its excellent competitiveness with other energy sources in thermoelectric power plants, mainly in emerging Asian economies, which base their economic development on domestically available energy, thus ensuring their energy independence. Its fixed combustion costs, which are higher than those of petroleum products or natural gas, are offset by lower, more stable fuel prices on major national (China, USA, India, Russia) or international (Atlantic and Pacific) markets. This is due to :

• fierce competition between exporters from new producers, thanks to sufficiently low barriers to entry into the industry to avoid a degree of corporate concentration likely to give rise to market power;

• the regular arrival of newcomers in the coal industry, countries developing exports or imports, companies developing mining estates ;

• abundant and widely distributed exploitable resources;

• the coexistence of traditional mining techniques, especially underground, and more capital-intensive techniques, especially open-cast;

• improved coal transport (railroads, roads and ports).

Coal is a major emitter of greenhouse gases. It could therefore be penalized by a high carbon price, which its users would have to pay in the form of a tax or emission rights, such as the European Union's Emission Trading Scheme. It is this uncertainty that makes forecasting future coal demand so difficult. However, the prospects offered by the development of carbon capture and storage technologies, if deployed on an industrial scale worldwide, would make coal the ideal energy source: clean, abundant, geographically well distributed, easily transportable, transformable (into electricity, hydrogen, liquid fuels, chemical bases).