Although Germany, the UK, US, Canada and Ukraine are phasing out domestic coal production capacity, expansion of production capacity in countries such as India and Indonesia is predicted to generate modest annual growth of 1.3% in coal production over the next four years, with output reaching 7.6 billion tonnes in 2022, according to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

Coal production in India, Indonesia and Australia is forecast to grow at respective compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) of 10.9%, 3.9%, and 2.3% between 2018 and 2022, with the high growth in India helping to reduce the country’s reliance on imports to feed its expanding coal-fired power generation.

After declining consecutively for three years, global coal production increased by 2.8% to 7,188.8 Mt in 2017 and then rose again by a marginal 0.1% to 7,194.1 Mt in 2018. Growth has been driven by India, Indonesia and Russia, where production increased by 3.1%, 1.2%, and 3.7% CAGR between 2014 and 2018, respectively.

Despite growth in 2017 and 2018, production has yet to reach historic levels as several mining companies have withdrawn, either partially or completely, from the coal business. These include China’s Yanzhou Coal, which has disposed of five coal projects in the last five years, and Nacco Industries, POSCO, CNX Resources who have collectively scaled back their coal assets by almost 50%. Rio Tinto, BHP and Vale have also sold almost all of their coal assets with the former completely exiting coal production.

—Vinneth Bajaj, Senior Mining Analyst at GlobalData

There are more than 300 coal projects potentially commencing operations between 2019 and 2022. Of these, 92 are currently under construction, with the remainder under various stages of development.

Of the total, 57 are located in Australia, 55 in India, 54 in China, 30 in South Africa, 18 each in Canada and Indonesia and 15 in the US.

The impact of these commencements will be marginally offset by over 100 coal projects expected to phase out over the same period, including 34 in India, 15 in China, 14 in South Africa and 13 each in the US and Australia.

—Vinneth Bajaj