China’s dependency on coal is likely to worsen this year as the authorities struggle to rein in prices after the Lunar New Year break. Chinese miners dug up more than 4 billion tons of the dirtiest fossil fuel for the first time in 2021. The effort to stave off power outages involved unleashing some 300 million tons of capacity that’s still producing, and which is likely to add another 1% or 2% to annual output this year, according to forecasts from the Shanghai Shipping Exchange. For demand, the exchange cited industry predictions that consumption is likely to grow by 0.5% a year through 2025 to 4.2 billion tons. It said industrial usage could slow as exporters face stiffer competition from other countries recovering from the pandemic, while Chinese manufacturers will continue to be constrained by energy conservation rules. Thermal coal futures, meanwhile, have recovered all of the […]