Economic growth of Asian countries drives coal consumption

In recent years, Asia's emerging economies have witnessed rapid economic development. As a high availability and cheap energy, coal accounts for an increasing proportion of their energy consumption. The world coal consumption pattern continues to move eastward. As one of the economies with great development potential, India has made great efforts in both fossil energy and renewable energy. From the production side, India's largest coal producer, namely, the national coal company of India, has seen a surge in coal production in recent years, reaching 570 million tons in 2018, and has become the world's largest coal producer. The company has proposed a coal production target of 1 billion tons in 2020 fiscal year. From the perspective of world coal production structure, India's share is increasing with the increase of coal demand. India's share of world coal production increased from 8.8% in 2015 to 9.9% in 2018. The national coal company of India is just a microcosm of India's coal production. In the future, with the continuous promotion of industrialization and urbanization, India's coal consumption demand still has a lot of room for growth. In recent years, Vietnam has made use of its late development advantages, cheap labor, stable government policies and large-scale local market to attract foreign capital and gain a "place" in the global manufacturing division of labor.

With the rapid economic development, Vietnam's coal consumption has increased significantly, from a net coal exporter to a net importer, and the consumption gap continues to expand. The overall trend of world power coal production driven by Asian economies is similar to the overall trend of world coal production. After being at a low output in recent years in 2016, it began to pick up in 2017, with a growth rate of 4.9%. Although the growth rate of production has narrowed (4.4%) in 2018, it still keeps increasing, reaching 5.98 billion tons. As the proportion of power coal in the world coal output is 75%, the world coal output is mainly affected by the change of power coal output. From the perspective of downstream consumption, Asian economies drive global power coal consumption. India, Vietnam and other emerging economies accelerated their industrialization and urbanization construction, infrastructure investment and real estate construction continued to heat up, and the demand for power coal increased. In 2018, India's power coal consumption accounted for 14.2% of the total global power coal consumption, an increase of 1.5% compared with 2015; while Vietnam's share of the total global power coal consumption increased from 9% in 2016 to 10.4%, and in the near future It can be seen that Vietnam has replaced Poland as the tenth largest power coal consumer in the world. From the perspective of energy production, the Korean government clearly put forward the policy of "gradual withdrawal of nuclear power" and announced that it would stop building more nuclear power plants in the future. In recent years, the failure of nuclear power reactors in the country is frequent, and part of the power generation share is replaced by coal power stations.

From 2015 to 2018, the compound annual growth rate of power coal in South Korea was 2%. Although Japan turned to coal power as an alternative in recent years due to the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, with the restart of nuclear power since 2017, the demand for power coal fell again. Japan's share of the total world power coal consumption dropped from 2.5% in 2015 to 2.3% at present. The coking coal production situation of "unpredictable" coking coal is quite different from that of power coal. From 2015 to 2017, the world coking coal production showed a slight decline, which is basically consistent with the change of world steel production. < p > < p > the world coking coal production only showed a positive growth (2%) in 2018, which was 1.03 billion tons. From the consumption side, this is mainly due to the recovery of China's real estate market, the high growth rate of new construction area, and the rising steel consumption. In addition, India's strong infrastructure and real estate development also boosted the demand for coking coal. At present, China is still the largest consumer market of coking coal. Although coking coal import fell in 2018, the demand for high-quality coking coal has been at a high level.

From the production side, the export volume of coking coal in Mongolia is increasing, from 13 million tons in 2015 to 26 million tons in 2018, doubling. In 2012, Mongolia introduced laws to restrict foreign investment, resulting in a large number of foreign capital divestments, the mining industry of the pillar industry continued to slump, and the economic growth dropped significantly. In order to reverse the decline, Mongolia has revised the investment law and the mineral law, relaxed the restrictions on foreign investment, and mining industry has become the main means to resolve the crisis of "earning foreign exchange". In addition, in recent years, Mongolia's high-quality coking coal mines have been put into production, supporting the increase of its export. In 2016, Russia's economy bottomed out, and its fossil energy export is still its pillar industry. In recent years, the export volume of coking coal in Russia has maintained an upward trend, from 19 million tons in 2015 to 26 million tons in 2018, with a compound annual growth rate of 12.6%. In terms of coking coal production, there is a bottleneck in Australia's output growth. The increase of Russia has replaced some markets of Australia's export, and the export volume of Australian coking coal has gradually declined. The coal export of the United States is mainly coking coal. Although the proportion of coking coal in the coal export has declined, the total coking coal keeps rising, which also slows down the decline of coal production in the United States. From 2015 to 2018, the annual compound growth rate of coking coal in the United States reached 10.2%.