By any stretch of the imagination, the US is one of the world’s biggest coal producers. Even after declining by about half since 2008, output last year was still about 527 million metric tons, the fourth-biggest total globally. And yet you could keep all of America’s coal boilers and blast furnaces going until Thanksgiving in 2025 with the reserves of solid fuel that Chinese industries have built up in the last couple of years.
The reasons for the emergence of this vast mountain — 636 million metric tons at the end of June, sufficient to cover Singapore in a layer of soot nearly a meter deep — aren’t a great mystery. When stocks ran perilously low in late 2021 and prompted widespread power cuts, Beijing ordered mines and power stations to boost their output and stockpiles so that something similar wouldn’t happen again.
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Publish date : 2024-09-05 08:00:00
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