Sxcoal Issue #9 | Dive deep into China's coal production
You may have seen coal production numbers from China's National Bureau of Statistics, but may want to dive deep into more granularized dataset to better understand the Chinese coal market. Here it is!
While China’s NBS only gives the aggregate numbers for China’s coal production, we at Sxcoal have tried to do more over the years to present more lens for analyzing the Chinese coal market in a more meaningful way.
China’s raw coal output reached a record high of 4.5 Bt last year, up 9.0% YoY. Non-coking coal output registered even higher growth of 10.6%, while coking coal stayed low at 5.2%, though increased from a 3.2% rise in 2021.
Such an outcome is mainly related to the Chinese government’s efforts to boost thermal coal supplies for power generation. This further reduced the share of ROM coking coal output to 29.3%, the first time ever below 30%.
Similarly, China’s washed coking coal production edged up by only 0.7% YoY to 493.5 Mt in 2022, extending the upward but slow growth seen in recent years. Luckily, with the easing of COVID restrictions and changed international market dynamics, China had been able to meet further increase in demand from its steel sector. Chinese customs data showed the country’s coking coal imports climbed 16.7% YoY to 63.84 Mt last year, with substantial increases from Mongolia and Russia.
As a result, China’s thermal coal market was well supplied with a surplus, if looking at the whole year of 2022, while coking coal market in a rough equilibrium, with a very small surplus.
Data behind
We have prepared the supporting data behind the above summary in a 3-page PDF file. That gives more details, incl. China’s total and top five provinces’ raw coal outputs (other bituminous coal, coking coal, anthracite and lignite), thermal and washed coking coal supplies, and thermal and coking coal supply and demand.
Such datasets are available on a monthly basis and sent to you before the end of each month. If you wish to learn more details or get a copy of the Dec 2022 numbers, please contact us directly by replying to news@fwenergy.com.