Indias coal footprint in the globalized world: evolution and drivers

Abstract

In 2017, India deviated from global low-carbon energy transformation, as its incremental coal consumption devoted to nearly 72% increase of the world. To cut India's coal demand, it requires to develop more effective measures, by the comprehensive understanding the evolution and drivers of India's coal consumption footprint in the globalized world. To fill the research gap of the existing researches that have paid less attention towards India's coal consumption footprint, a multi-regional input-output analysis and decomposition technique were applied to explore the India's coal footprint in the globalized world. From 1995 to 2009, the coal consumption of India embodied in production-based and consumption-based activities continued to grow, mainly for domestic coal consumption of the electricity sectors. Affecting by the development of the opening trade, the proportions of virtual coal export and import had obvious rise, both with a slightly decline by 2008–09 global economic crisis. The coal intensity of India was the major driver of the increase of India's coal consumption, following with the domestic final demand. India should pay more attention on the improvement of the energy efficiency, and cooperated with global world of more clean energy and advanced technologies, to decrease the coal consumption.