China produces more coal than the rest of the world combined. See which countries dominated global coal production in 2024.
  • China accounts for over half of global coal production.
  • Just six countries produce nearly 90% of the world’s coal.
  • Asia dominates both total output and recent production growth.

China produces more coal than all nations combined.

According to the 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy, China produced 4.78 billion tonnes of coal in 2024, accounting for 51.7% of the global total.

Coal production is also highly concentrated beyond China. The top six producing countries, including India, Indonesia, and the U.S., together account for 87% of total supply.

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India ranks second at just over 1 billion tonnes, but its 11.7% share is far behind China’s majority.

The top six is rounded out by Indonesia (9.0%), the United States (5.0%), Australia (5.0%), and Russia (4.6%), after which production drops off sharply.

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  • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
    21·
    4 days ago

    I don’t disagree about them dumping low cost goods on everyone else to drive competitors out of business and in fact I’ve argued before that they’re doing that with their EV subsidies, however…

    Look at everything you own. What percentage of it is made in China, or made out of components or materials from China? All of that is part of Chinese energy/CO2. In the west we can claim we’re moving towards emitting less CO2, sure… But a large part of it comes from having outsourced most of our manufacturing to China and other low-cost countries (China being the cheap place for high-tech stuff, some other Asian countries being the cheap place for low-tech stuff since they have even cheaper labor than China, whereas China has amassed expertise in building things like consumer electronics).

    Personally I think my car’s just about the only product I own that’s not made in China or made of majority Chinese-manufactured components and that’s just because it’s about two decades old and the Germans were still doing a lot of things in Germany at that point. The same OE suppliers (ZF, Bosch, etc) have now moved a lot of their production to China too, so now in 2026 even if you buy a German car manufactured in Germany, it’ll have more Chinese parts on it than it would have had a few decades ago. Okay, sure, the CPU and GPU of my PC and the SoC on my phone are not from China, but they’re from TSMC, so that’s still something we enjoy here in Europe en masse without the energy cost affecting our numbers. I also checked and my mouse and keyboard both hail from China.

    My point isn’t that China is innocent in all this, but that we aren’t exactly being fair when looking at these numbers most of the time.

    Also if they’re flooding the world with cheap solar panels, by all means, go for it. They’re still pretty costly where I come from, so clearly there’s room to go even lower with the price.