Renewables and coal are working to push out crude oil in China

Reuters

4 days ago

LAUNCESTON, Australia, July 24 (Reuters) - The headline news in China's energy transition is often about how the world's second-largest economy is adding solar and wind generation at a breakneck pace.
What is less discussed is how this is affecting the rest of the energy landscape, and how China is treading a different path to decarbonisation than most Western nations.
In the West, renewables such as wind and solar have largely pushed out coal-fired power generation, and the intermittency that they bring to grids has been addressed by using natural gas, and to a lesser extent battery storage.
In China, renewables have lowered coal's share of electricity generation, but only slightly, and the world's biggest miner, importer and consumer of coal is currently building even more coal-fired plants.
Instead of pushing out coal, it appears that the fuel being most targeted by renewables in China is crude oil.
This isn't because renewables directly replace crude or refined products. It's because China is trying to rapidly electrify its economy and transport systems.
While it may not please anti-coal environmentalists or oil exporters such as the OPEC+ group, China's accelerated electrification does make economic sense, and over the long term it may even make environmental sense too.
China installed 46 gigawatts (GW) of wind power and 198 GW of solar in the first five months of the year, as well as 3 GW of hydropower, according to data from the National Energy Administration.
In contrast, just 18 GW of thermal power generation, mainly coal, was added in the January to May period, meaning that renewable energy accounted for 93% of the capacity additions.
China is installing solar at such a fast pace that Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, calculated that in May it was adding 100 solar panels every second.
However, China also has 227 GW of coal-fired power under construction and a further 257 GW in the pipeline, according to the Global Energy Monitor.
China accounts for 83% of the global coal-fired generation capacity currently being built and its 1,789 GW of operating coal-fired generation accounts for 55% of the world total.
The overall picture that emerges from China's current and planned electricity generation is renewables are accounting for the bulk of the growth, but coal is still increasing even if its share of total generation is starting to decline.
What is also clear is that China is adding electricity generation faster than any other major economy.
Part of the reason Beijing is doing so is because of the rapid rollout of electric and hybrid vehicles, which China collectively refers to as New Energy Vehicles (NEVs).
Total vehicle sales rose 11.4% to 15.65 million units in the first half of 2025 from the same period last year, according to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, with NEV sales surging 43% to 6.94 million units.
The increasing share of NEV sales in China has led the International Energy Agency (IEA) to forecast hardly any growth in China's oil product demand this year, with it estimating an increase of just 81,000 barrels per day (bpd).
The main drag on China's product demand growth is gasoline, which the IEA expects to drop by 141,000 bpd in 2025 from 2024.
The increasing sales of electric heavy vehicles, as well as those powered by liquefied natural gas, are expected to see diesel demand drop by 40,000 bpd.
The drivers of growth in China's oil product demand are naphtha, ethane and liquid petroleum gas, which the IEA forecasts will rise by a combined 199,000 bpd.
The main uses for these products include plastics and chemicals. Rising demand is a reflection of strength in vehicle and other manufacturing, despite concerns over the potential fallout from import tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump.
China's crude oil imports rose a modest 1.4% in the first half of 2025, as refiners bought more crude than they processed as prices trended lower in the second quarter.
The country's crude oil imports dropped 1.9% in 2024 from the prior year, and the modest gain so far this year suggests the country may be at, or nearing, peak oil consumption.
This makes economic and strategic sense for Beijing.
China will want to move away from imported crude as fast as it can, given the commodity's inherent vulnerability to geopolitical events and its history of price fluctuations.
Using electricity to replace oil boosts energy security and lowers China's import bill.
While China is adding renewables at an impressive rate, it still makes sense to use the vast domestic reserves of coal as a fuel, especially if it replaces expensive and uncertain crude oil.
Using coal also makes more sense in China than natural gas, with the bulk of the country's gas supplies either imported via pipelines or in the form of LNG.
This makes natural gas more expensive than coal, meaning it will only be used for applications that are difficult to electrify, such as some industrial heating.
In some weird way, coal is turning out to be China's transition fuel from crude oil to renewables.
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The views expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.