Looks like coal caught a cold

great, it's gonna be great! fabulous, terrific.

 

Consider this chart:


Coal, Australian thermal coal - Monthly Price - Commodity Prices - Price Charts, Data, and News - IndexMundi


With 3% annual inflation throughout, coal price has returned to 1988(ish) values. A 13-year run up has ended. Arguably that was caused by more players getting into the coal game. Now they are headed elsewhere.

That could all be reversed if coal begins to look like a grower again, but gas and liquid fossils argue against it. As does, to a smaller extent, renewable E.

 

China's more efficient plants will cause the world to burn more not less coal.

As Beijing Joins Climate Fight, Chinese Companies Build Coal Plants - The New York Times
By 2020, every Chinese coal plant will be more efficient than every US coal plant - Vox

China has a problem. Their coal plants are very polluting, which is obvious to anyone that visits the country. It is not cheap to retrofit the old plants to reduce the unhealthy pollution, so they have invested heavily in R&D to make Ultra Super critical more efficient and lower polluting coal plants. Let's call it better coal. Because of this investment they have been building new coal plants and will shut down the less efficient higher polluting ones. What do you do with this investment? You sell the technology to foreign countries, which is exactly what china is doing.

Because of the pollution problem and the heavy costs of imported fuel, it is strategic for the chinese economy to do these things. The US DOE because of politics has cut funding for such things in favor of hydrogen and solyndra. ;-) Worse yet in america the epa pretty much stopped new coal from being built because of regulations, but let old grandfathered plants pollute much longer than they should. Clean power plan and interstate pollution was a work around, instead of having congress actually pass a new clean air bill that made more sense. GE could be the big exporter of new coal technology, but now it looks like the Chinese will be making the most money on clean coal.

For many countries like china, efficient coal is the cheapest way to quickly build a lot of electricity infrastructure. China has plateaued in coal use, as their economic growth has slowed, and coal pollution has been recognized as a big problem. As they shut down the heavy polluting sub-critical coal plants, my guess is they will again have a coal plant building boom. I doubt coal use has really peaked in china. IEA is notoriously bad at predicting energy use in the future. The new coal plants will help fuel costs/kwh and unhealthy pollution much lower than the old plants.