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The top 20 Coal-burning countries in the world

Coal-burning countries; No country escapes Climate change. The world's three biggest consumers of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel,

By Ground report
New Update
biggest coal economies in 2023

No country escapes Climate change. The world's three biggest consumers of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, are preparing to increase use so much that it will almost be as if the pandemic-induced drop in emissions never happened.

That transition appears to be starting to have an impact on the global energy mix, as coal generation fell a record 4% (-346 terawatt-hours (TWh)) in 2020, according to climate think tank Ember’s Global Electricity Review.

As the most carbon-intensive source of electricity, coal power must fall by 14% each year during this decade to put the world on track for net-zero emissions by 2050.

We were curious about which countries burned the most, so we compiled a list of the top 20 coal-burning countries in the world based on the latest statistics from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

# Country Yearly Coal Consumption
(MMcf)
World
Share
Cubic Feet
Per Capita
1 China 4,319,921,826,000 50.5 % 3,055.00
2 India 966,288,692,600 11.3 % 729.54
3 United States 731,071,000,000 8.5 % 2,263.27
4 Germany 257,488,592,900 3.0 % 3,132.70
5 Russia 230,392,143,100 2.7 % 1,585.90
6 Japan 210,559,949,300 2.5 % 1,648.05
7 South Africa 202,298,474,200 2.4 % 3,599.13
8 South Korea 157,124,158,500 1.8 % 3,081.87
9 Poland 148,799,901,400 1.7 % 3,916.90
10 Australia 129,642,679,100 1.5 % 5,343.29
11 Turkey 116,877,929,300 1.4 % 1,464.12
12 Indonesia 102,623,737,100 1.2 % 392.36
13 Kazakhstan 86,633,849,830 1.0 % 4,858.64
14 Taiwan 72,649,581,410 0.8 % 3,076.00
15 Ukraine 59,357,188,880 0.7 % 1,327.49
16 Vietnam 56,641,097,040 0.7 % 604.88
17 Czech Republic (Czechia) 49,418,771,720 0.6 % 4,653.87
18 Serbia 43,189,608,110 0.5 % 4,878.00
19 Canada 42,907,416,750 0.5 % 1,179.33
20 Thailand 42,674,985,870 0.5 % 618.74

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