Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is responsible for about 30% of the global temperature increase observed since the industrial revolution.
China accounts for more than 10% of annual global human methane emissions, in large part due to unintended releases – known as “fugitive” emissions – from its energy sector.
In a recently published study, we take a closer look at China’s coal-mine methane (CMM) emissions, which account for roughly 40% of the nation’s total methane emissions.
Leveraging newly collected, mine-specific data, we develop granular estimates of CMM emissions in China since 2000.
These estimates reveal that China’s coal production is shifting towards provinces with lower-emission mines.
In addition, there has been a significant increase in the capturing of methane from coal mines for energy use.
Together, these developments have helped to limit the rise of CMM emissions, despite an overall increase in coal production since 2016.
Mine data
To estimate CMM emissions at a granular level, we needed to understand how emissions vary from one mine to the next across China.
To do this, we made use of existing safety regulations in China. As methane is a highly flammable gas, the Chinese government enforces mandatory methane gas level identification in coal mines and implements safety regulations accordingly.
Coal mines are categorised based on their “methane emission factors”, the volume of methane emitted per tonne of coal produced.
At one end are low-gas mines, with an emissions factor of less than 10 cubic metres (m3) of methane emitted per tonne of coal. At the other are high-gas mines, at more than 10m3 of methane emitted per tonne. Beyond this are “outburst” mines, which are those that have experienced coal seam or gas outburst incidents.
To get a clearer sense of how much low-gas, high-gas and outburst mines emit in practice, we built a model of the relationship between gas levels and emission factors, using a 2011 database of all Chinese coal mines.
This database includes information on methane gas levels, mine-specific emission factors, coalbed depth, mine ownership and production capacity. We further validated this relationship with newly collected coal mine data from 2023, published by Chinese local governments.
The results show that the distribution of emission factors, as shown in the figure below, varies significantly with gas level.
The top row in the figure below shows the emissions factors for a range of mines in 2011 classed as low-gas (top left, green), high-gas (top centre, pink) or outburst (top right, red). The dashed vertical lines show the central estimate for each type, ranging from 4.1m3 per tonne for low-gas mines through to 19.9m3/tonne for high-gas and 28.4m3/tonne for outburst mines.
The bottom row shows the same metrics based on the more recent 2023 data.
The strong correlation shown in the data above suggests that gas level is a crucial indicator of how much methane a coal mine emits.
In contrast, our analysis reveals no significant correlation between how much a coal mine emits and either coal mine depth or ownership.
Comparing the distributions for the same gas levels between 2011 and 2023 also shows that the link between gas levels and methane emissions remains fairly constant over time.
Therefore, the gas level of a mine can reliably serve as a proxy for its methane emissions per tonne of production, when direct measurements are unavailable.
Provincial shift
To estimate CMM emissions for each province in China, we assumed that the percentage of coal produced by mines of each gas level remains roughly constant as in 2011.
For instance, if 20% of Guizhou’s coal production in 2011 came from low-gas mines, we maintained this percentage for subsequent years.
We then calculated CMM emissions by multiplying provincial-level production-weighted emission factors by total coal production.
The line chart below illustrates our estimated CMM emissions since 2000.
The raw estimates, depicted by the lower grey dashed line, show a rapid increase in CMM emissions from approximately 5m tonnes in 2000 to nearly 21m tonnes in 2013.
This was followed by a decrease to 15m tonnes in 2016 and a subsequent rebound to 24m tonnes in 2023.
The decline between 2013 and 2016 aligns with a period of reduced coal production in China.
On the chart, the upper grey line represents CMM emissions when abandoned coal mines are included.
These mines, which continue to release methane long after operations cease, were responsible for 4.8m tonnes of methane emissions in 2020, contributing approximately 25% to the total CMM emissions.
Meanwhile, the blue line shows CMM emissions when the capture and use of methane in energy supply is taken into consideration.
National methane utilisation increased from 1.2m tonnes in 2008 to 3.7m tonnes in 2020, resulting in a reduction of total emissions by 5% and 17%, respectively.
It is noteworthy that CMM emissions did not immediately rebound after 2016, despite a reported increase in coal production by China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
This delay can likely be attributed to shifts in production locations to lower-emissions provinces, the closure of high-emissions mines and the adoption of technologies for capturing and using methane that effectively mitigate emissions.
The figure below compares CMM emissions across provinces in 2012 and 2021, two years with nearly identical total coal production levels.
Overall, changes in methane emissions closely mirrored shifts in where the coal was being mined. There is a clear geographic trend: production and emissions surged in northern and north-western regions such as Xinjiang, Shaanxi and especially Shanxi.
In fact, Shanxi alone emitted nearly 8m tonnes of coal-mine methane in 2021, making up roughly half of China’s total CMM emissions.
Meanwhile, both production and emissions dropped in south-western provinces, including Guizhou, Sichuan and Yunnan.
The figure shows that China’s coal production has switched from regions in the south-west where emissions per unit of coal production are relatively high, to lower-emission areas in the north and north-west. At the same time, total production levels have stayed similar, at just over 4bn tonnes in both 2012 and 2021.
Tackling methane
China has signalled its intention to address methane emissions, with key tasks for the next five years outlined in a national methane action plan published in 2023.
The broad trends of CMM emissions observed in this study will likely continue in China.
Small-scale coal mines – those producing less than 300,000 tonnes of coal per year – are at risk of closing or being consolidated, while increased production from large-scale, lower-emission mines in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia will likely lead to an overall reduction in national production-weighted emission factors.
(This reduction in the rate of emissions per unit of coal production does not guarantee a reduction in methane emissions overall, as several analyses show this also depends on the total coal output. Even following closures, methane may still leak from abandoned mines.)
However, this regional shift in coal production – and, thus, methane emissions – could also help to address public health concerns from pollution associated with the gas.
The Chinese government has also introduced significant changes in policy on the capturing and use of methane gas. The Ministry of Ecology and Environment recently revised coal-mine methane standardsto mandate the capture and use of methane with concentrations above 8%, down from a previous 30%.
In addition, the government has a programme providing financial incentives for capturing methane and reducing CMM emissions.
Together, these measures could help China achieve its short- and medium-run methane capture and use goals set by the methane action plan.
The post Guest post: How changes to coal mining have affected China’s methane emissions appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How changes to coal mining have affected China’s methane emissions
A new report from Greenpeace Australia Pacific sets out the pathway forward for Australia to be a global leader on ocean protection. With the Treaty now in force, Australia and nations around the world, have an important opportunity to drive the creation of ocean sanctuaries on the high seas, by leading with ambition, science and collaboration to ensure this landmark agreement delivers lasting protections.
The report was launched on Tuesday 23rd June at Parliament House at an event to celebrate Australia’s recent ratification and look ahead to implementation. The event was attended by Parliamentarians, Ambassadors, Departmental leaders and civil society. Thank you to everyone for celebrating with us. To ensure the Treaty is strong, fit for purpose and delivers its role of creating ocean sanctuaries on the high seas across the global ocean – multilateralism and collaboration is essential. The event hosted by Greenpeace Australia Pacific and WWF was a strong step forwards on the implementation pathway.
The Global Ocean Treaty is one of the most significant international nature agreements in history and the first focused on protecting biodiversity in the high seas. These waters cover 64% of the ocean, are home to extraordinary biodiversity, and until now, less than 1% have been fully or highly protected.
Clean power added more to global energy supplies than any other source in 2025, according to the latest Energy Institute statistical review of world energy.
Outside the Covid pandemic, it was also the first year ever in which wind and solar, when combined, contributed more new energy than any of the individual fossil fuels.
The findings illustrate the “growing prominence” of electricity in the global energy system, according to the Energy Institute, a professional membership body that took over the production of the annual statistical review from oil firm BP in 2023.
It notes that electricity demand is rising much faster, at 3% in 2025, than energy use overall at 1.7% – and that all of the new power supply came from low-carbon sources.
While it includes data on data-centre demand for the first time, the review shows that these only make up 2% of all electricity use and 15% of the increase in 2025.
(The review does not explore other sources of demand, but separate data shows electrification of industry, heat and transport is a far larger driver of growth than data centres.)
At the same time, every source of energy – including coal, oil, gas, nuclear and hydro – also reached global all-time highs in 2025, the statistical review shows.
While the 86% of “primary energy” that came from fossil fuels is a record low, their real contribution to the economy is far lower, because roughly two-thirds of their energy is lost during combustion.
Below, Carbon Brief highlights the key findings of the review in six charts.
- Global energy supplies increase 1.7% in 2025
- Fossil fuels met a record-low 86.2% of global energy supply
- The ‘primary energy fallacy’ ‘inflates fossil fuels’
- Wind and solar were biggest source of new energy in 2025
- Clean energy met all of global electricity growth in 2025
- China generates more power than the US, EU and India combined
Global energy supplies increase 1.7% in 2025
The review shows that global energy supply reached a record high in 2025, climbing 10 exajoules (EJ, 1.7%) to more than 600EJ for the first time ever.
Within this total, there were new all-time highs for every energy source: oil; coal; gas; nuclear; wind and solar; as well as hydro and other renewables. This is shown in the figure below.
Notably, coal hit a new record of 166EJ in 2025, up 0.7% from a year earlier and 2.8% above the level reached in 2014, which had been seen as a potential peak for the fuel.
Wind and solar saw the fastest growth, up by 18.3% year-on-year, as well as adding more to global supplies – in combination – than any single fuel source.
Fossil fuels met a record-low 86.2% of global energy supply
Nevertheless, on the basis of these primary energy figures, the contribution of low-carbon sources to the global energy system still looks relatively small.
The latest data shows that fossil fuels made up 86.2% of global primary energy supplies, as shown in the figure below.
The rise of nuclear power had pushed the fossil-fuel share of global energy down to 91% as long ago as 1986, before the Chernobyl disaster pulled the plug on further growth.
It is only in the past decade that clean-energy sources have started to gain more ground, as a result of the rapid expansion of wind and solar.
The ‘primary energy fallacy’ ‘inflates fossil fuels’
Crucially, however, the statistical review is based on “total energy supply” (TES), a measure of primary energy. This counts the energy stored in coal, oil, gas and nuclear fuel going into the energy system, whereas for renewables it measures the amount of electricity coming out.
Yet, most of the energy in fossil fuels is lost as waste heat during combustion.
In fact, some two-thirds of all primary energy is lost before it can be turned into useful energy that moves a car, warms a home or keeps the lights on.
This gives rise to the “primary energy fallacy”, which tends to “inflate…the perceived contribution of fossil fuels” and the difficulty of replacing them with low-carbon energy sources.
For example, the figure in the post shows that 105 units of energy went into the global transport sector – almost all of it oil – but this only generated 20 units of transport “energy services”.
In other words, less than 20% of the primary energy being used for transport actually ends up moving people or goods, while the remaining 80% was lost as waste heat.
Until 2024, the statistical review sought to address this issue by using the “substitution method” for clean-energy sources. This listed the primary energy supplied by wind and solar, for example, as the amount of fossil fuels that would have been needed to generate the same amount of electricity.
It stopped using this approach in 2025, explaining that this would reveal the higher efficiency of a clean-energy system that loses less energy during fossil-fuel combustion. It explained:
“Put simply, in future we will need to supply less energy in the form of clean electricity to undertake the same amount of work as the equivalent energy supplies from fossil fuels. Primary energy demand will decrease as the energy system increasingly electrifies and renewable electricity continues to increase its share of generation..”
Wind and solar were biggest source of new energy in 2025
With this in mind, it is all the more notable that wind and solar, in combination, were the world’s biggest source of new energy in 2025, as shown in the figure below.
Again, perhaps two-thirds of the new primary energy added by fossil fuels last year will never actually contribute useful work to the economy, because it will be lost as waste heat.
In contrast, the new energy added by wind and solar is in the form of electricity and almost all of it can be used directly to power factories, homes, appliances and electric vehicles.
Moreover, wind and solar saw the fastest growth by far, up 18% in 2025 alone. Over the past decade, they expanded fivefold, while coal, oil and gas grew by 6%, 9% and 21%, respectively.
Clean energy met all of global electricity growth in 2025
The impact of renewables is clearest in the power sector, where combined with a new record for nuclear power, they met all of the growth in global electricity demand in 2025.
This is shown in the figure below, which illustrates how fossil generation was flat last year and how wind and solar now generate more electricity than hydro or nuclear power.
The review says that wind and solar power, when combined, grew by 18% in 2025, whereas there was a small decline in coal generation balanced by a small rise for gas.
Overall, it says that global electricity generation increased by some 940 terawatt hours (TWh, 3%), roughly three times the annual demand of the UK.
Separate figures, included in the review for the first time, show that data centres used 788TWh of electricity in 2025, up 130TWh on a year earlier.
This means that data centres accounted for 2% of global electricity demand.
China generates more power than the US, EU and India combined
The Energy Institute report says that the power sector is set to play an increasingly important role, because it is growing more quickly than other parts of the global energy system.
There is also increasing political attention on the idea of using expanded clean-power supplies to rapidly electrify other parts of the economy, particularly heat and transport.
The COP31 presidency has called for countries to back a global goal for 35% of “final” energy to come from electricity by 2035, against a global average today of around 22%.
China is well ahead of the global average, with electricity making up 30% of its final energy supplies in 2025. It recently adopted a 35% by 2030 target for electrification.
One reason it has been able to do this is the huge scale of its electricity system. Indeed, China now generates more electricity than the US, EU and India combined, as shown in the figure below.
While much of the rise in China’s electricity has historically come from coal-fired generation, there was enough growth of clean-power sources to push coal down last year.
The post Six charts show how clean power was world’s largest source of new energy in 2025 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Six charts show how clean power was world’s largest source of new energy in 2025
Climate Change
We need no-go mining zones for the energy transition to be just: Here’s how it could work
Perrine Fournier is a trade, mining, and forest campaigner at Fern.
The threat that mining critical raw materials poses to some of the planet’s most important ecosystems is beyond dispute. To prevent it, some places on Earth must be declared off-limits for mining under any circumstances. Work has already began to identify them.
A global power struggle to secure strategic resources powering the energy transition, AI and weapons systems is driving growing demand for minerals such as copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel and manganese, which are used to make electric vehicles (EVs), batteries, wind turbines and other clean energy technologies needed to transition away from fossil fuels.
This mining boom is compounding the threats that extraction poses to precious ecosystems – including tropical forests which are vital to address climate change – and the communities who depend on them.
Preventing this environmental destruction and ensuring that mining is carried out within planetary boundaries is urgent. One solution that is gaining traction has long been advocated by Indigenous groups: creating mining no-go zones.
Fern and a group of NGOs in consultations with Indigenous Peoples’ organisations have began to sketch out a methodology to map out where mining poses unacceptable social, environmental and human rights-related risks and should be prohibited.
Off-limits: Fragile ecosystems that store carbon
The methodology is based on six criteria to determine where mining should be off-limits.
This includes areas protected under international conventions; areas with high conservation value from intact forests to key biodiversity hotspots; forests, peatlands and wetlands that are critical for carbon storage; significant ecosystems such as small islands, mangroves and grasslands; critical water bodies and Indigenous Peoples’ territories.
Around half of the of the metals and minerals needed for the energy transition are located on or near Indigenous Peoples’ territories.
A case in point is Brazil, one of the most mineral-rich countries on earth. Recent research shows that the expansion of mining threatens the conservation of about 363,000 km2 of protected land in the Brazilian Amazon, which consist mainly of forests, and is home to 195,000 traditional and Indigenous people.
Deforestation is a major driver of climate change as it releases carbon stored in the trees into the atmosphere, weakening the forests’ role as a carbon sink. Most of the Brazilian Amazon should therefore be off-limits to mining, both to protect Indigenous Peoples’ rights and because of its crucial role for the climate and biodiversity.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, mining has had a devastating impact on the precious Miombo forest, one of the world’s largest dry forest ecosystems, and local peoples’ food security. This too is an area where mining should not be allowed to take place.
Protected areas must be default no-go zones
In Europe, efforts to secure access to minerals is also threatening fragile ecosystems. Recent reporting revealed that the European Commission disregarded expert advice when selecting “strategic” mining sites eligible for streamlined permitting procedures, with several environmentally and socially controversial projects added to the list after they initially failed to meet expert assessments.
One project which met the expert assessment but is nevertheless attracting controversy is the Sakatti nickel mining project in Finnish Lapland.
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Part of its nickel deposit lies under a rich peat bog ecosystem, a major carbon store which developed when glacial rivers and a lake melted at the end of the late Ice Age. The site is protected under Finnish law and is as part of the Natura 2000 network intended to protect Europe’s most valuable species and habitats. These legal safeguards are on the verge of being overridden. Such protected areas should always remain off-limits to mining.
Kicking starting a discussion
To prevent mining from undermining human rights and global climate and biodiversity goals, we urgently need to adopt a global and precautionary approach. This should start with a shared definition of which areas on land and sea should be considered off-limits for extraction.
The methodology we propose is intended to kick-start a broader and transparent discussion, based on scientific, legal and social criteria, in which rights-holders and Indigenous Peoples’ organisations have a seat at the table. No mining should go ahead if it doesn’t have the Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) of Indigenous Peoples’ or local communities.
Many of the restricted areas are bound to lie in forested tropical countries in the Global South, which understandably want to capitalise on their resources to spur industrial development and create jobs. But history has taught us that relying on a single resource for development runs the risk of being trapped in a resource curse. The more diversified an economy is, the more secure it is.
Reducing mineral demand
Our modelling shows that for minerals such as nickel, cobalt, lithium, there are sufficient resources that could be mined outside of these restrictive areas to wean the global economy away from climate-wrecking fossil fuels and shift to clean energy systems.
However, that requires hard policy choices, such as reducing mineral demand by promoting more efficient vehicles and alternative battery technologies that are less reliant on critical minerals, as well as better public transport, active travel and car sharing opportunities.
In addition, recycling has a major role to play. A major study recently showed that Europe could meet half of its critical mineral needs through recycling by 2050.
Some mining to access the materials the world needs to address climate change is both inevitable and necessary. But agreeing on a framework to restrict mining in the world’s most sensitive areas will protect them from its ravages, and break the destructive patterns of the past.
The post We need no-go mining zones for the energy transition to be just: Here’s how it could work appeared first on Climate Home News.
We need no-go mining zones for the energy transition to be just: Here’s how it could work
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