According to the IEA, there were 560,000 industrial boilers in China, at the end of 2014, of which about 460,000 were coal-fired boilers, which consumed about 600 million tons of coal each year. These industrial boilers are the targets of China's pollution control operations. The IEA expects that, from 2018 to 2022, an average of 110 million tons of coal will be replaced by natural gas each year. This means that in the next five years, driven by China, more countries will abandon coal-fired boilers and use natural gas boilers. This seems to have become an unavoidable trend.
This is the core content of the International Energy Agency's (IEA) 2017 coal report, which mentioned that coal will continue to be an important global energy source, but its importance will gradually decline.
According to the IEA, it is expected that the global average coal demand growth rate will be only 0.5% from 2018 to 2022, and the demand in 2022 will only be 177 million tons of coal equivalent higher than in 2016.
The demand of China, the largest consumer country, will drop by 0.1% annually, and will drop to 2.787 billion tons of coal equivalent by 2022. The United States will decline by an average of 0.9% annually, while European developed countries will decline by 1.6% annually.
India remains the biggest sustenance for coal producers, and the country’s thermal coal demand is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 3.3%, and by 2022 it will increase to 605 million tons of coal equivalent.
Before the coal gas reform policy has been fully implemented, most international manufacturers will not make major changes to this. However, from a long-term perspective, gas-fired boilers have become an alternative to coal-fired boilers. The trend of blocking, even though these countries in India are still using coal as the main fuel for boilers, under the influence of future national policies, coal-fired boilers cannot avoid being replaced by natural gas boilers.