The Economist: Golden scenarios

ONCE upon a time, in a world in which oil was costly and energy sources seemed scarce, the International Energy Agency, a think-tank for countries which import fossil fuels, produced a special report heralding a “golden age of gas”. That was in 2011. It suggested that fast-rising demand, chiefly from emerging economies and in power generation, could lead gas to displace coal by 2030.

Big energy companies shared that optimism. High prices and rising demand in East Asia, especially China and Japan, encouraged them to pile into huge projects in places such as Australia and Papua New Guinea to produce liquefied natural gas (LNG), either from offshore drilling or, in the case of a $20 billion project in Queensland by BG Group of Britain, from gas found in coal beds. America, awash with gas thanks to the shale boom, began rejigging coastal terminals originally built for importing LNG, so as to begin exporting it.

But something unexpected happened. Coal, despised as the dirtiest fossil fuel, underwent an unexpected renaissance, notably in Europe, displacing gas in power generation. This was partly because of plentiful supplies of cheap coal on world markets, and partly because the European Union’s regime for trading in permits to emit carbon dioxide was so flawed that coal was not getting taxed out of the market, as had been intended. (This week the European Parliament made moves towards reforming the regime.)

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