According to BP's Statistical Review of World Energy1, global coal production dropped by 6.5 percent in 2016 with a slower drop in global coal consumption of 1.7 percent. Coal consumption was 2.1 percent higher than coal production in 2016, lowering the level of global coal stocks. China, the world's largest energy consumer and emitter of greenhouse gases, consumed the less coal in 2016 than in any of the previous six years, dropping its consumption by 1.6 percent from the previous 2015. In the United States, coal consumption dropped by over 8 percent to a level last seen in the early 1980s. Not all countries lowered their coal use, however. Turkey and the Ukraine, for example, increased their use of coal, as did Indonesia and some other Asian countries.
