With blistering speed, the rich countries that built their wealth on coal-powered industrialization are turning their backs on dirty energy.
Coal consumption in the UK, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, fell last year to less than 10% of its levels a decade earlier, and dropped by nearly a third year-on-year in January and February, according to government data. At one point last month, fossil power as a whole dipped as low as 2.4% of electricity generation in Britain, the news site Carbon Brief noted. In the US, coal usage fell 17% during 2023, and will drop another 12% by 2025. In the European Union, the slump in coal power generation last year came to 26%.
There’s one notable exception to that brightening picture: Japan.
Odd One Out
Coal consumption has slumped in most G7 countries. In Japan it’s increased
Note: Rebased. 2000=100.
That’s making the country increasingly isolated among wealthy democracies. Ministers at the Group of Seven meeting in Turin this week promised to phase out coal generation by 2035, a target that might have seemed fantastical a decade ago but now appears well within reach almost everywhere.
Japan was only able to sign onto the statement with a “dog-ate-my-homework” strategy, depending on weasel words to cover up for the absence of any serious strategy to wean itself off solid fuel.
Previously, the G7’s statements have only made vague gestures toward a “predominantly decarbonized power sector by 2035,” placing no hard deadlines on a coal phaseout. As cheaper renewables (and, in the US, gas) have driven more and more soot from the power mix, ambitions have risen.
The UK will switch off its last coal generator in October and France’s final two plants will power down about the same time. Italy will follow suit next year, while Canada’s target is for 2030. Germany is legally required to close coal by 2038 but is hoping to bring that date forward to 2030. The US last week published new rules requiring any plants that hope to be operating in 2039 to be capturing 90% of their emissions by 2032, a death knell for remaining stations.
The situation is very different for Japan which, far from closing down coal plants, is still opening them.
At Yokosuka south of Tokyo, the country’s biggest power producer JERA Co. has opened two 650 megawatt units since June. At Matsushima near Nagasaki, Electric Power Development Co., or J-Power, will start work later this year refitting one of its plants to operate using gasified coal, a technology that promises only marginal emissions reductions.
Too Little, Too Late
Japan will need dramatic expansions of nuclear, solar and wind to hit even its modest targets for reducing coal generation
Note: Data is in terawatt-hours.
Under the country’s current strategic energy plan, coal will still account for about 19% of generation in 2030 — producing emissions roughly equivalent to those from Argentina, the Philippines, or the whole of West Africa. That’s likely to be a significant underestimate of the actual figure, since it depends on heroic assumptions about Tokyo’s ability to restart nuclear generators shuttered after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, as well as breakneck growth in wind, solar, hydro and geothermal power.
Japan managed to sign on to the G7 statement using the most transparent of fictions. The promise is only to phase out “unabated generation,” an ill-defined term that Tokyo is trying to drive an 80,000 ton coal ship through the middle of. Abatement technologies are those that reduce power plant emissions by more than 90%, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, though you won’t find that definition in the dictionary. The quixotic strategies being explored by Japan — coal gasification and co-firing of ammonia and hydrogen in thermal generators — are unlikely to achieve more than about 20% savings, and have never been tested on a commercial scale.
When Japan is serious about its energy policy, it makes firm plans — as with its recent push for LNG importers to sign decades-long supply deals. The absence of such contracts commensurate with its purported carbon storage and hydrogen procurement needs exposes its fig leaf of a coal phase-out policy.
That’s a failure not just in climate terms, but in terms of basic security and economics. At a time when a weakening yen is pushing up the cost of living and sparking speculation that the government is intervening in currency markets, fossil fuels still amount to between a quarter and a third of the total import bill.
Fueling Inflation
Fossil fuels are typically the swing factor in Japan’s trade balance
Japan’s dependence on imported oil, gas and coal has been a pressing national concern for more than a century, one the government still tracks by analysis of the country’s meager energy self-sufficiency ratio. With Asian nations teetering on the edge of maritime clashes in the waters through which close to 85% of Japan’s power supply travels, it’s more of a risk than ever.
Even Australia is now heading toward a 2038 coal phaseout. When that happens, Japan will find itself — alongside its neighbors Taiwan and South Korea — as one of the only rich countries still burning the dirtiest fuel. That commitment is impoverishing its people, risking its security and damaging the climate. It’s not too late to change course.
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