ChinaSpecialReport: "Waning fossil fuels and green exports make China important for all of us," by Bob Haar.
Notoriously, China has been the engine of fossil fuel [FF] demand growth for a full quarter-century. Between 2000 + 2025, it accounted for ~ half of increase in world-wide oil demand + > 90% of growth in coal demand.
However, FF are now starting to wane as renewables drive more generation, in a new phase for the country’s energy transition. Coal generation has stopped growing in 17 of 26 provinces. The clean energy system is expanding while parts of the FF system are starting to shrink. Battery storage is increasingly central in balancing all that clean energy, allowing utilization to double over the past 2 years.
This shift away from FF is diffusing from power plants + vehicles to industrial sectors. In fact, 8 of their industrial sectors are now powered primarily by electricity, no longer dominated by FF.
Second quarter this year—with 75% of Chinese buses already electric & half the taxis, sales of EVs reaching 65%, electric trucks 30%, + vans 50%—1.5 million barrels per day [Mbpd] were displaced. That’s 1.5% of global demand, roughly France’s share.
Year earlier, the displacement from transport was 750K barrels daily, so the plunge in transportation oil doubled in a single year. Sinopac, China’s biggest oil company, saw demand down 9% Jan-June.
Traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles saw steep drops month after month, leading to the point where 9 out of the top 10 best-selling cars in China now are plug-in hybrids [PHEV] or battery-electric vehicles [BEV]. Electric heavy trucks, jumping by roughly 90% year-on-year through the first half of 2026, became the fastest-growing source of oil displacement.
China’s green exports are helping many countries access cheap clean energy, which reached a record high of $20 B for August. To fend off repetitious comments, I will again assert that the country is an autocratic hypersurveillance state which mistreats minorities, especially Uyghurs + Tibetans.
