تجزیه و تحلیل عرضه زغال سنگ در چین و تاثیر آن بر رشد اقتصادی آینده چین

Many people believe that China's economic growth can continue almost indefinitely. For a manufacturing-based economy such as China's to continue to grow, it needs an adequate supply of inexpensive energy. To date, this energy growth has primarily come from coal, but China's indigenous coal supplies are now falling short of the amount needed to support this growth. In this situation, the status of China's future coal supply will be very important for China's future economic development. Our analysis shows that China's ultimate recoverable coal reserves equal 223.6×109 MT, and its production will peak between 2025 and 2030, with peak production of approximately 3.9×109 MT. The extent to which China can import coal in the future is uncertain. With rising coal demand, this combination is likely to create a significant challenge to China's future economic development.

As one of the dominant engines of the world's economic growth, the future of the Chinese economy is of great interest to scholars around the world. The debate as to whether China's growth can continue usually centers on issues such as the real estate bubble, the debt crisis of local governments, the high level of inflation, the low efficiency of government investment, wealth disparities, environmental pollution and destruction, and the aging population. These problems truly exist; however, they are not the fundamental factors that will decide the future course of the Chinese economy. The hidden issue that has the power to hold back economic growth is an inadequate supply of cheap energy. China is a country that bases its economy on manufacturing (China's primary, secondary and tertiary industries accounted for 10.1%, 46.8% and 43.1% of its GDP in 2010) (National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBSC), 2011a), and manufacturing depends on an adequate supply of affordable energy, typically inexpensive and only accounting for a small amount of the total cost. The primary source of this affordable energy is currently coal; coal accounts for more than 76.5% of China's energy production and about 68.0% of its energy consumption in 2010 (National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBSC), 2011a), making it far more important than oil, gas and other energy resources. We know that coal, like any non-renewable resource, is finite, and thus, at some point the amount extracted each year will cease to grow as the resource gets depleted. Yet China's energy policy today is based on the premise that China has a virtually inexhaustible supply of coal resources (Wang, 2007a and Li et al., 2010). In fact, China became a net coal importer in 2009 (Pan and Wang, 2010), because its own production is already falling short of the amount needed to maintain economic growth. China's inability to raise supply as quickly as desired raises questions about China's long-term coal supply. In this paper, we perform an analysis that shows that China's annual extraction of coal is likely to begin to decline in the 2025 to 2030 time period. This study is based on our analysis of China's coal resources, and how much of these resources are likely to be ultimately recoverable. The lack of future supply, together with the lack of suitable alternatives and the expected rise in the price of coal that is available can be expected to have adverse economic consequences. The structure of this paper is as follows. Section 2 provides a detailed analysis of China's ultimate recoverable reserves (URR) for coal because of the importance of URR in forecasting future coal production. Section 3 analyzes future coal supply, coal demand and coal imports of China. Section 4 analyzes the availability of other energy sources that might be used as alternatives to coal. Section 5 summarizes the main findings of this paper.

Based on the above analyses, we reach several important conclusions. First, a detailed analysis of China's coal resources/reserves classification system is performed, and then the URR numbers over time are analyzed based on the resources/reserves classification. It is found that the URR of China's coal is basically constant after 2001 except for a slight decline in 2010, with an average value of 223.6×109 MT. Second, China's coal production is forecasted based on the estimated URR and a logistic production model. The result indicates that coal production will peak in 2027, with a peak production of 3.97×109 MT. Then, considering and combining other similar analyses, it is estimated that China's coal production will peak between 2025 and 2030, with peak production of approximately 3.9×109 MT. Furthermore, it is noted that actual production may peak earlier and the maximum production may be lower if some other factors are considered, such as water availability, land availability, transportation capacity and climate change. However, extensive treatment of such factors where outside this study. Third, it is concluded that estimates of China's future coal consumption tend to be underestimated by most scholars. According to Shealy and Dorian (2010), even using a relatively conservative annual GDP growth target of 6.5% for the next fifteen years, China's coal demand will still reach 6.12×109 MT in 2025, which is higher than some major institutions such as International Energy Agency (IEA) (2010), Energy Information Administration (EIA) (2010), National Development and Reform Commission of China (NDRC) (2009) have forecast. However, China's domestic production is forecast to be limited to 3.9×109 MT, which means the gap between demand and supply will reach 2.22×109 MT in 2025. We also show that it may be very difficult for China to meet its gap by importing coal and developing alternative energy sources, which means that China's economic growth may be affected due to the shortage of coal supply. In addition, rising coal price can be expected to seriously influence China's economic growth (Ding et al., 2011). China's coal will become more expensive in years ahead for several reasons. First, increasing domestic coal demand, limited domestic coal reserves and production will tend to lead to a rise in the price of coal (Li, 2009). Second, increasing gap between domestic coal demand and production will lead China to import more coal from international markets. Some studies have suggested a likely significant increase of world coal prices in the coming decades (Kavalov and Peteves, 2007 and Heinberg and Fridley, 2010), and rising international coal price will surely promote the increase in domestic coal prices because of the higher costs of imported coal. Furthermore, the cost of imported coal is likely to be further increased by high transportation costs arising from increasing world oil prices (Kousnetzoff et al., 2008 and Transportation Economics & Management Systems, Inc. (TEMS), 2008). In fact, China's coal prices have already been rising since China's coal pricing entered the Market-oriented pricing period in 2002 ( Tu, 2011), and are expected by some to continue to rise in future ( Wang and Zhang, 2011). To sum up, Tverberg (2012) has shown that limited oil supply and the concomitant rising oil prices can have an adverse impact on economic growth. Other studies have also shown that high oil prices can lead to recession (Kilian, 2008, Kilian, 2009, Hamilton, 2009 and Fantazzini et al., 2011). China's economic growth requires an adequate supply of affordable and inexpensive coal, and currently, coal is more important than oil in China. It is believed that limited coal supply and rising coal prices will present a significant challenge to China's economic growth.