The EIA Keeps Lowering Its Projections For Coal Usage In 2040

The EIA puts together what seem to be the best analyses of the world energy market, and their reports are steadily projecting less coal usage going forward...

I was unable to find reports for each year, but starting in 2013, it looks like they project out to 2040. Here are summaries that contain the plots I'm referencing:

• 2013
• 2016
• 2017

Here are the relevant graphs pulled from those in order:

2013 Projection

2016 Projection

 

2017 Projection

Sorry for the shitty quality...I just took the images from those reports and blew them up so they are very low-resolution. What should be clear though is that the projections for coal usage are lower each year. It looks like the 2040 projection for coal usage from each report in quadrillion BTU is:

• 2013: ~220
• 2016: ~180
• 2017: ~160

These are only projections of course, but it's interesting to see how quickly coal's future is weakening according to the EIA's projections.

Other interesting things to note in them:

• projected total energy usage from renewables is roughly the same in each report (~125 quadrillion BTU by 2040)
• projected total energy usage from all sources is lowest in the 2017 report