Ten years ago, switching from burning coal to gas was a key element of China’s policy to reduce severe air pollution.
However, while gas is seen in some countries as a “bridging” fuel to move away from coal use, rapid electrification, uncompetitiveness and supply concerns have suppressed its share in China’s energy mix.
As such, while China’s gas demand has more than doubled over the past decade, the fuel is not currently playing a decisive role in the country’s strategy to tackle climate change.
Instead, renewables are now the leading replacement for coal demand in China, with growth in solar and wind generation largely keeping emissions growth from China’s power sector flat.
While gas could play a role in decarbonising some aspects of China’s energy demand – particularly in terms of meeting power demand peaks and fuelling heavy industry – multiple factors would need to change to make it a more attractive alternative.
Small, but impactful
The share of gas in China’s primary energy demand is small and has remained relatively unchanged at around 8-9% over the past five years.
It also comprises 7% of China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fuel combustion, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Gas combustion in China added 755m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) into the atmosphere in 2023 – double the total amount of CO2 emitted by the UK.
However, its emissions profile in China lags well behind that of coal, which represented 79% of China’s fuel-linked CO2 emissions and was responsible for almost 9bn tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2023, according to the same IEA data.
Gas consumption continues to grow in line with an overall uptick in total energy demand. Chinese gas demand, driven by industry use, grew by around 7-8% year-on-year in 2024, according to different estimates.
This rapid growth is, nevertheless, slightly below the 9% average annual rise in China’s gas demand over the past decade, during which consumption has more than doubled overall, as shown in the figure below.
The state-run oil and gas company China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) forecast in 2025 that demand growth for the year may slow further to just over 6%.
The majority of China’s gas demand in 2023 was met by domestic gas supply, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
Most of this supply comes from conventional gas sources. But incremental Chinese domestic gas supply in recent years has come from harder-to-extract unconventional sources, including shale gas, which accounted for as much as 45% of gas production in 2024.
Despite China’s large recoverable shale-gas resources and subsidies to encourage production, geographical and technical limitations have capped production levels relative to the US, which is the world’s largest gas producer by far.
CNPC estimates Chinese gas output will grow by just 4% in 2025, compared with 6% growth in 2024. Nevertheless, output is still expected to exceed the 230bn cubic metre national target for 2025.
Liquified natural gas (LNG) is China’s second most-common source of gas, imported via giant super-cooled tankers from countries including Australia, Qatar, Malaysia and Russia.
This is followed by pipeline imports – which are seen as cheaper, but less reliable – from Russia and central Asia.
One particularly high-profile pipeline project is the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline project. However, Beijing has yet to explicitly agree to investing in or purchasing the gas delivered by the project. Disagreements around pricing and logistics have hindered progress.
Evolving role
Beijing initially aimed for gas to displace coal as part of a broader policy to tackle air pollution.
A three-year action plan from 2018-2020, dubbed the “blue-sky campaign”, helped to accelerate gas use in the industrial and residential sectors, as gas displaced consumption of “dispersed coal” (散煤)”– referring to improperly processed coal that emits more pollutants.
Meanwhile, several cities across northern and central China were also mandated to curtail coal usage and switch to gas instead. Many of these cities were based in provinces with a strong coal mining economy or higher winter heating demand.
China’s pollution levels saw “drastic improvement” as a result, according to a report by research institute the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
(In January 2026, there were widespread media reports of households choosing not to use gas heating despite freezing temperatures, as a result of high prices following the expiry of subsidies for gas use.)
Industry remains the largest gas user in China, with “city gas” – gas delivered by pipeline to urban areas – trailing in second, as shown in the figure below. Power generation is a distant third.
Gas has never gained momentum in China’s power sector, with its share of power generation remaining at 4% while wind and solar power’s share has soared from 4% to 22% over the past decade, Yu Aiqun, a research analyst at the US-based thinktank Global Energy Monitor, tells Carbon Brief.
Yu adds that this stagnation is largely due to insufficient and unreliable gas supply, which drives up prices and makes gas less competitive compared to coal and renewables. She says:
“With the rapid expansion of renewables and ongoing geopolitical uncertainties, I don’t foresee a bright future for gas power.”
Average on-grid gas-fired power prices of 0.56-0.58 yuan per kilowatt hour (yuan/kWh) in China are far higher than that of around 0.3-0.4 yuan/kWh for coal power, according to some industry estimates. Recent auction prices for renewables are even cheaper than this.
Meanwhile, the share of renewables in China’s power capacity stood at 55% in 2024, compared with gas at around 4%.
Generation from wind and solar in particular has increased by more than 1,250 terawatt-hours (TWh) in China since 2015, while gas-fired generation has increased by just 140TWh, according to IEEFA.
As the share of coal has shrunk from 70% to 61% during this period, IEEFA suggests that renewables – rather than gas – are displacing coal’s share in the generation mix.
However, China’s gas capacity may still rise from approximately 150 gigawatts (GW) in 2025 to 200GW by 2030, Bloomberg reports.
A report by the National Energy Administration (NEA) on development of the sector notes that gas will continue to play a “critical role” in “peak shaving”, where gas turbines can be used for short periods to meet daily spikes in demand. As such, the NEA says gas will be an “important pillar” in China’s energy transition.
In 2024, a new policy on gas utilisation also “explicitly promoted” the use of gas peak-shaving power plants, according to industry outlet MySteel.
China’s current gas storage capacity is “insufficient”, according to CNPC, reducing its ability to meet peak-shaving demand. The country built 38 underground gas storage sites with peak-shaving capacity of 26.7bn cubic metres in 2024, but this accounts for just 6% of its annual gas demand.
Transport use
Gas is instead playing a bigger part in the displacement of diesel in the transport sector, due to the higher cost competitiveness of LNG as a fuel – particularly in the trucking sector.
CNPC expects that LNG displaced around 28-30m tonnes of diesel in the trucking sector in 2025, accounting for 15% of total diesel demand in China.
This is further aided by policy support from Beijing’s equipment trade-in programme, part of efforts to stimulate the economy.
However, gas is not necessarily a better option for heavy-duty, long-haul transportation, due to poorer fuel efficiency compared with electric vehicles (EVs).
In fact, “new-energy vehicles” (NEVs) – including hydrogen fuel-cell, pure-electric and hybrid-electric trucks – are displacing both LNG-fueled trucks and diesel heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs).
In the first half of 2025, battery-electric models accounted for 22% of all HDV sales, a year-on-year increase of 9%, while market share for LNG-fueled trucks fell from 30% in 2024 to 26%.
Gas can be cheaper than oil but is not competitive with EVs and – with the emergence of zero-emission fuels such as hydrogen and ammonia – gas may eventually lose even this niche market, says Yu.
Supply security
Chinese government officials frequently note that China is “rich in coal, poor in oil and short of gas” (“富煤贫油少气”). Concerns around import dependence have underpinned China’s focus on coal as a source of energy security.
However, Beijing increasingly sees electrification as a more strategic way to decarbonise its transport sector, according to some analysts.
“Overall, electrification is a clear energy security strategy to reduce exposure to global fossil fuel markets,” says Michal Meidan, head of the China energy research programme at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
Chinese oil and gas production grew dramatically in the last few years under a seven-year action plan from 2019-25, as Beijing ordered its state oil firms to ramp up output to ensure energy security.
Despite this, gas import dependency still hovers at around 40% of demand. This, according to assessments in government documents, exposes the country to price shocks and geopolitical risks.
The graph below shows the share of domestically produced gas (dark blue), LNG imports (mid-blue) and pipeline imports (light blue), in China’s overall gas supply between 2017 and 2024.
“Gas use is unlikely to play a significant role in decarbonising the power system, but could be more significant in industrial decarbonisation,” Meidan tells Carbon Brief.
She estimates that if LNG prices fall to $6 per million British thermal units (btu), compared to an average of $11 in 2024-25, this could encourage fuel switching in the steel, chemical manufacturing, textiles, ceramics and food processing industries.
The chart below shows the year-on-year change in gas demand between 2001-2022.
Growth in gas demand has been decelerating in some industries in recent years, such as refining. But it also remains unclear if Beijing will adopt more aggressive policies favouring gas, Meidan adds.
A roadmap developed by the Energy Research Institute (ERI), a thinktank under the National Development and Reform Commission’s Academy of Macroeconomic Research, finds that gas only begins to play an equivalent or greater role in China’s energy mix than coal by 2050 at the earliest – 10 years ahead of China’s target for achieving carbon neutrality.
Both fossil fuels play a significantly smaller role than clean-energy sources at this point.
Wang Zhongying and Kaare Sandholt, both experts at the ERI, write in Carbon Brief:
“Gas does not play a significant role in the power sector in our scenarios, as solar and wind can provide cheaper electricity while existing coal power plants – together with scaled-up expansion of energy storage and demand-side response facilities – can provide sufficient flexibility and peak-load capacity.”
Ultimately, China’s push for gas will be contingent on its own development goals. Its next five-year plan, from 2026-2030, will build a framework for China’s shift to controlling absolute carbon emissions, rather than carbon intensity.
Recent recommendations by top Chinese policymakers on priorities for the next five-year plan did not explicitly mention gas. Instead, the government endorses “raising the level of electrification in end-use energy consumption” while also “promoting peaking of coal and oil consumption”.
The Chinese government feels that gas is “nice to have…if available and cost-competitive but is not the only avenue for China’s energy transition,” says Meidan.
The post Explainer: Why gas plays a minimal role in China’s climate strategy appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Explainer: Why gas plays a minimal role in China’s climate strategy
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US,