Too Big to Unwind? About the Current State of China’s Coal Sector

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides insights into the political economy of coal in China, useful for studying energy transitions in state-dominated economies.

🏢実務担当者:For corporate sustainability teams, understanding China's coal dependency is crucial for supply chain and investment risk assessments.

🏛政策担当者:EU and other policymakers should integrate this analysis into climate diplomacy and avoid overestimating China's progress based on renewable deployment alone.

Key Takeaways - Despite rapid renewable expansion, China continues to build and commission new coal-fired power plants and increases raw coal production. This persistence reflects the coal sector’s deep economic and political role in China’s development model. - China still lacks a coherent, targeted coal phase-out strategy. Decarbonization remains fragmented, with coal-dependent, resource-depleted cities offering early insights into the challenges ahead. Their common responses include diversifying into heavy industry and expanding tourism. - Coal-dependent cities face major structural constraints: slowing growth, population decline, and limited investment capacity. In many underdeveloped regions, these pressures make economic transition difficult and reinforce continued reliance on coal. - Key coal-based industries remain central to China’s economy, including coal-to-chemicals, and coal-based hydrogen among others. Framed as green transition strategies, they often amount to rebranded continuity rather than true transformation. - EU policy and analysis should account for China’s underlying coal intensity, avoid equating renewable growth with full decarbonization, and strengthen cooperation on localized coal phase-out strategies.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.31175/eh4s.7ocbfirst seen 2026-05-29 04:47:00 · last seen 2026-06-03 04:43:55