Global Coal Consumption and Production: Fun with Charts

There is a lot of interesting data freely available on the web.  The data I used to produce the below chart comes from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which is full of data, statistics and reports on the United State's and world's energy usage.

This time I have concentrated on coal, an old-fashioned and dirty energy source, which is still hugely important in the economic activities of much of the world, including the USA.

The sky-blue and burgundy bars on the chart represent total production and consumption of coal, in billions of tons, and match up to the left-hand scale.  The orange line represents the net over or under-production of each country (ie, production minus consumption), and matches up to the right-hand scale, which is in hundreds of millions of tons.  The graph does not include all of the countries that are in the EAI database; to make it legible  I only selected those that had some kind of significant production or consumption of coal.

So what can we glean from the above?

• China is by far the largest producer and consumer of coal in the world.  In fact, I had to scale back the size of China's bars in order to keep them from making the smaller countries' unreadably small. 
• China is relatively self-sufficient when it comes to coal, but for the last couple of years have had to import a small percentage of their demand.  Because of the huge size of this demand, it has led to economic opportunities for countries such as Australia and Indonesia.
• India appears to be a similar story to China, on a smaller scale, though with an even larger coal "deficit" than China's.
• USA, which gets about 50% of its electricity from coal, is the second largest producer and consumer, but still less than a third of China in both production and consumption.  In recent years it has gone from being a net consumer to being a net producer.
• Besides India and China, the largest net consumers of coal are the developed export-led economies of East Asia --Japan, South Korea and Taiwan-- which consume moderate amounts of coal but have virtually no production of the mineral.
• The developed countries of Western Europe -- including Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain-- are all net importers of coal, with modest consumption but very little production, though  Germany, which produces and consumes more than the others is a bit of an exception.
• The largest net producers (exporters) of coal are: Australia, Indonesia, Russia, South Africa, Colombia, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, USA and Canada.
• I had some difficulty arriving at absolute dollar equivalents for the tons of coal represented here.  I read that coal prices are relatively stable, but can vary greatly depending on the type and grade of coal, and the location and method of shipment.  To get a ballpark figure, we can put a value of $20 on each ton of coal, which basically implies flows in the tens of billions of dollars for the largest markets.