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Modelling India’s coal production with a negatively skewed curve-fitting model

  • Jianliang Wang
    ,
  • Yongmei Bentley
    ,
  • Roger Bentley
Research Output:
Contribution to journal
Article
 Peer-review

Open access

Sustainable Development Goals

  • SDG 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy
    SDG 7 Affordable and Clean Energy

Abstract

India’s coal demand is forecast to increase at a rapid pace in the future due to the country’s economic and population growth. Analyzing the scope for future production of India’s domestic coal resources, therefore, plays a vital role in the country’s development of sound energy policies. This paper presents a quantitative scenario analysis of India’s potential future coal production by using a negatively skewed curve-fitting model and a range of estimates of the country’s ultimately recoverable resources (URR) of coal. The results show that the resource base is sufficient for India’s coal production to keep increasing over the next few decades, to reach between 2400 and 3200 Mt/y at 2050, depending on the assumed value of URR. A further analysis shows that the high end of this range, which corresponds to our ‘GSI’ scenario, can be considered as the probable upper-bound to India’s domestic coal production. Comparison of production based on the ‘GSI’ scenario with India’s predicted demand shows that the domestic production of coal will be insufficient to meet the country’s rising coal demand, with the gap between demand and production increasing from its current value of about 268 Mt/y to reach 300 Mt/y in 2035, and 700 Mt/y by 2050. This increasing gap will be challenging for the energy security of India.

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output:
Contribution to journal
Article
 Peer-review

Original language

English

Pages from-to (Number of pages)

Pages 365-378

Journal (Volume, Issue Number)

Natural Resources Research (Volume 27, Issue 3)

Publication milestones

  • Published - 05/10/2017

Publication status

Published - 05/10/2017

ISSN

1520-7439

Publication IDs

  • handle.net: 10547/622802
  • Scopus: 85030857238

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