China battles to contain coal price surge as dependency worsens

China’s dependency on coal is likely to worsen this year as the authorities struggle to rein in prices after the Lunar New Year break.

Chinese miners dug up more than 4 billion tons of the dirtiest fossil fuel for the first time in 2021. The effort to stave off power outages involved unleashing some 300 million tons of capacity that’s still producing, and which is likely to add another 1% or 2% to annual output this year, according to forecasts from the Shanghai Shipping Exchange.

For demand, the exchange cited industry predictions that consumption is likely to grow by 0.5% a year through 2025 to 4.2 billion tons. It said industrial usage could slow as exporters face stiffer competition from other countries recovering from the pandemic, while Chinese manufacturers will continue to be constrained by energy conservation rules.

Thermal coal futures, meanwhile, have recovered all of the slump that occurred just before the lunar holiday as power plants rebuild stockpiles and traders ignore for now the government’s pledge to control prices.

In its latest attempt to cool the market, the state planning agency noted that output has returned to pre-holiday levels and that inventories are significantly above where they were a year ago. The intervention made little difference to the contract in Zhengzhou, which has powered above 800 yuan a ton in an explosive start to the week.

Still, while that’s a historically high level, it pales beside the near-2,000 yuan a ton hit in October at the height of the energy crisis.