China’s wasted coal reserves could supply the United States

In any case, the United States is one of the world’s largest coal producers. Even after having declined by about half since 2008, output last year was about 527 million metric tons, the fourth largest in the world. And yet, you could keep all of America’s coal-fired boilers and blast furnaces running until Thanksgiving 2025 with the solid fuel reserves that Chinese industries have built up over the past two years.

The reasons for the appearance of this enormous mountain — 636 million metric tons by the end of June, enough to cover Singapore in a layer of soot almost a meter thick — are not a great mystery. When stocks ran dangerously low in late 2021, causing widespread power outages, Beijing ordered mines and power plants to increase their production and reserves so that something similar would not happen again.