Australia is burning. Follow the coal trail .
Fires are currently ravaging Australia where flames have burned over 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres), destroyed more than 900 homes and pushed Sydney’s air quality levels to hazardous levels.
Record temperatures are contributing to what the BBC called ‘earlier, bigger, and more dangerous fires’
Despite the crisis, Prime Minister Scott Morrison defended his government’s aggressive support for Australia’s coal industry.
To better understand Australia’s role in the global coal market, I created a few charts looking at coal production data from BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy in 2019.
China is the world largest producer of coal in 2018 by several orders of magnitude. China extracted over 1,828 million tonnes oil equivalent of coal in 2018 which makes up over 46% of global production.
China extracted more coal in 2018 than the next 9 countries combined: United States, Indonesia, India, Australia, Russia, South Africa, Colombia, Kazakhstan, and Poland.
This reaffirms the nation which I highlighted in a previous blog post that no drastic action on climate change can possibly happen in the 21st century without major action from China.
Australia however is by far the largest coal exporter in the world according to the latest 2019 BP data.
Australian’s coal exports have shown very few signs of weakness over the past decade and was only superseded once in 2012 by Indonesia.
I also computed production on a per capita basis using World Bank population data.
While the focal point of coal extraction in absolute terms should be China, it’s imperative to understand the breadth of the Australian coal industry by calculating this per capita figure. It also offers a new perspective of major coal producers worldwide.
At 12.05 tonnes of oil equivalent of coal production, Australia is by far the largest producer of coal on a per capita basis.
It’s also interesting to note that China in that regards drops to seventh on the list with ‘only’ 1.31 tonnes of oil equivalent of annual coal production.
Coal production and subsequent consumption is an essential driver of climate change. Record temperatures and fires in Australia today should be an absolute warning sign of a future dictated by more drought, fires, and catastrophe if drastic action is not taken now. Australia has an immense responsibility to urgently scale back on coal production and exports worldwide.