The economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, combined with widespread policies aimed at reducing the carbon intensity of power generation, resulted in world coal consumption falling -3.1% (in energy terms) in 2020.

On a tonnage basis, 2019/20 saw the largest decrease ever recorded, -3.8%.

The majority of countries saw reductions in domestic coal supply. Nevertheless, there were exceptions, such as China1 and Indonesia, +0.6% and +14.8% respectively, where in both cases supply increased by more than 20 Mt. On the other hand, the biggest year-on-year decreases in supply in 2020 were in the United States, the European Union2 and India, with volumes down by 18.1%, 19.3% and 4.4% respectively.