It may look like a great coincidence that while the Paris Climate Summit gave a clarion call to all nations to move away from coal usage and embrace cleaner energy sources, the US has recorded the surge of natural as its primary energy source in power production over coal.

In September, natural gas displaced coal as the leading power source for the fourth time in history. According to the data from federal energy, all the four milestones in natural gas were registered in 2015. It said natural gas, became the main power source in the months of April, July, August and September. The prices were also lower than coal and burning gas was cheaper for producing power, reported Reuters.

The data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) said generators produced 123,248 thousand megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity with gas in September versus 118,489 MWh with coal.

Coal-based electricity production peaked in 2007 and since then the amount of electricity produced from coal has been declining during the past eight years. However, coal continues to be in use for power production. It remains the nation's leading source of electricity producing 34 per cent of the country's power versus about 32 per cent for gas.

Alternate sources

The biggest sources of power production during the first nine months of 2015 were nuclear (19 percent), followed by non-hydro renewables such as wind and solar at 6 per cent, the EIA said.

Many US power companies have already shut over 11,000 megawatts (MW) of coal-fired plants until 2015. It is expected that coal-based capacity for another 3,000 MW will stop by the end of 2015, according to Thomson Reuters data.

So, it appears that gas is on track to replace coal and 2015 is being billed as its biggest year for US power production with 1,284,506 thousand MWh generated over the past 12 months. That would top the current record for gas of 1,225,894 thousand MWh recorded in 2012.

Global consumption falling

Globally coal consumption peaked in 2013 and has been falling dramatically since then. The forecast by Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) said coal use will decline by an additional 2 to 4 per cent before the end of the current year. This is because consumption of coal in China has come down considerably, reports Mining Weekly.

The decline in coal consumption by China was 5.7 per cent so far in 2015, after a decade of almost double-digit growth. The US reduced coal use by 11 per cent, Canada 5 percent, Germany 3 per cent and the UK 16 per cent. Only in India, coal consumption has grown 3 to 6 percent year on year.

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