by Dr L. Schernikau, April 7, 2026 in WUWT
Dr. Lars Schernikau: Energy Economist, Commodity Trader, Author (recent book “The Unpopular Truth… about Electricity and the Future of Energy”)
Details including the full Blog on coal “Coal keeps the lights on… are we experiencing a “new” renaissance of coal?” are available at www.unpopular-truth.com
For years now, coal has been treated like a relic… a dirty word, something we were told would quietly disappear during the “energy transition”.
But yet, here we are… global coal consumption has definitely not declined, quite the contrary, it has only grown from roughly 6 billion tons in 2008 (when I wrote my first book on coal “The Renaissance of Steam Coal”) to around 9 billion tons today. Not to mention the seaborne trade which almost doubled! So the question is not whether coal is disappearing as we were told, it’s whether we misunderstood this useful black rock in the first place.
Our material world runs on something we are avoiding…
We like to think we live in a “clean” digital world with all our devices, apps, AI and cloud storage, but our physical world has not gone anywhere and should also be considered in this equation.
Steel, cement, metals, fertilizers….so many elements needed to actually build our modern lives which still heavily depends, directly or indirectly, on coal.
Did you know that roughly one-third of all coal is used not for electricity, but for industry? In fact, when you include electricity used for industrial purposes, more than half of all coal globally is consumed by industries keeping our daily amenities running :
- steel production,
- cement manufacturing,
- chemicals and fertilizers,
- high-temperature industrial heat (also used to make silicone for those very popular solar panels
), and on and it goes. - …