In an interview with www.321energy.com, Dave Feickert highlights that coal currently covers 69% of China's primary energy demand. He expects this proportion to remain high in the future because China has plentiful reserves of good quality coal.
In the meantime, China's less adequate reserves of oil have meant rising reliance on imports and its natural gas reserves are less developed, Feickert says. He therefore believes that China will have to rely on coal as a main source for energy as otherwise the country "will have to buy more oil and gas off the world market".
Besides, Freickert thinks nuclear power and renewables in China, "are unlikely to expand fast enough" to meet growth in energy demand. Nuclear is expected to cover only about 4% of China’s energy needs in 2020 despite involvement from the US, Australia or France as the US is hesitant about encouraging China to develop its nuclear industry, Freickert says. Renewable energy sources, in the form of hydro power makes up nearly 8% of the energy production in China. But it comes at a heavy social and environmental cost, Freickert points out.
Mr. Feickert concludes that China's expected push for coal could have serious consequences in environmental and energy issues worldwide. If the Chinese coal consuming and industry production development is not assisted properly by the Western world, he fears that an "incipient oil price shock could become very real, even provoking a world recession".
This rising coal consumption will inevitably lead to a drastic rise in CO2 "unless an economic recession of sufficient scale drastically reduced world energy demand or the sky high oil price led to huge energy substitution, with high hydrocarbon prices making renewables and nuclear more economic".
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