As Dan Yergin reminds us, energy transitions don’t happen on command:
“The 19th century is known as the “century of coal,” but, as the technology scholar Vaclav Smil has noted, not until the beginning of the 20th century did coal actually overtake wood as the world’s No. 1 energy source. Moreover, past energy transitions have also been “energy additions”—one source atop another. Oil, discovered in 1859, did not surpass coal as the world’s primary energy source until the 1960s, yet today the world uses almost three times as much coal as it did in the ’60s.“
Coal is not going away. Per IEA, coal consumption in 2022 set a new record (8.3 billion tonnes) and will stay at or near that level in 2023 and 2024. See the chart below for 2021, 2022, and 2023 (est.) consumption in million tonnes. India and China are joined by the “Rest of the World” (outside the US and EU) in the billion tonne club.
Message: Coal is cost effective and reliable, and will continue to be a major source of energy.
Bud's Offshore Energy (BOE) 