The decline of coal is creating new economic opportunities. From China to the United States, here is how communities are being reborn after the end of their dependence on it.
The overtaking of renewables over coal is a reality. Over the next five years, the growth in global coal demand will come to a halt. This is what the International Energy Agency (IEA) argues in its medium-term coal market report. In this context, even the largest coal consumers, such as China and India, will not be able to avoid thinking about alternative energy solutions.
The cities that have grown up around mines and that sustain themselves through coal extraction activities will need to be able to transform their economies, facing a change that is not only economic and productive but deeper — anthropological and cultural. In Appalachia, a region of the eastern United States that spans West Virginia, Kentucky and other territories along the eponymous mountain range in eastern North America, they are struggling to do just that.
Coal's share in the energy mix for electricity generation will fall over the next five years from 41 per cent (2014 figure) to 36 per cent, according to the IEA. A positive trend driven by the rapid growth of renewables and lower coal demand from China and the United States. A positive signal, despite the world remaining still heavily dependent on coal. Today, 30 per cent of global energy comes from this source, and it will fall to 27 per cent in 2021.
In the coming years, the decline in coal consumption in the United States and Europe will be accompanied by an increase in emerging countries, particularly in South-East Asia, where, in order to grow, the focus is on coal as the most widely available and relatively affordable energy source.
China's peak coal consumption was reached in 2013, and since then the trend has reversed. "China's golden decade of coal is over. We see coal demand declining, slowly but structurally," said Keisuke Sadamori, one of the directors of the International Energy Agency. A reversal that surprised the IEA itself, which had not foreseen such a change. The causes are increased energy efficiency, the growth of low-carbon energy production and lower energy intensity in the industrial sector.
In the energy sector, Beijing is gradually shifting investment from coal to nuclear and renewable sources, against a backdrop of weakening energy demand. Yet despite this, it continues to invest in new coal-fired power plants. A waste of resources, in a country where there is already more than enough coal-fired generating capacity — capacity that will in practice render the new plants entirely redundant. Those currently in operation are running for less than half the time, and there are no signs that this trend could reverse in the near future.
In the United States as well, the coal crisis is tangible, with coal being increasingly displaced by renewables — estimated to grow by 72 per cent by 2040 — or by natural gas, which last year became the country's primary source of electricity.
Despite the electoral campaign of president-elect Donald Trump, in which he promised to save the coal industry by abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency and repudiating international climate agreements, a report published on FastCoExist.com tells a different story from West Virginia and Kentucky. Many residents, state administrators and private company executives know full well that the coal industry is dying and that the time will soon come to draw a final line under all the activities and jobs it had created.
Although some are still clinging to a past that cannot save them, many communities in Kentucky that have so far sustained themselves through coal and its related industries are today looking for ways to give life to a new economy. No easy task in areas where coal has become a mindset — the cultural and spiritual symbol of people who have lived watching their own family members work, suffer and die underground.
"If we want to stay here and have a future, we have to start looking for other ways to live. We have to do it quickly, without sitting around and waiting for something to happen. It won't depend on the federal government or on someone else coming to save us. We have to work and do it ourselves," explains Guendalina Christon, owner of a grocery store in Isom, Kentucky.
In many mining centres in Appalachia, the aim is to break out of a single-sector economy by encouraging the birth of new businesses and working to reinvigorate the local rural economy, transforming it into something multifaceted and resilient. Great emphasis will also be placed on improving education for new generations — the only way to ensure that young people have the tools needed to face the challenges of new markets. In West Virginia alone, it is expected that by 2020 jobs requiring post-secondary education will account for 52 per cent of the total, whereas today only 19 per cent of the population (and 12 per cent in Kentucky) holds a degree or higher qualification — credentials that have been superfluous until now in a labour market dominated by coal, which paid relatively well and demanded no specific skills.
