By Ed Crooks: June 10. 2016
Two of the most widely respected energy analysts – BP’s economics team and the International Energy Agency – published reports this week, and both brought bad news for fossil fuel producers. They differed, however, in the focus of their gloomy perspectives. For BP, publishing its 65th annual Statistical Review of World Energy, it was coal that came off worst. As Spencer Dale, BP’s chief economist, put it in his presentation, “2015 was undoubtedly an annus horribilis for coal”. The shift to natural gas for power generation in the US gathered pace, and there was a second consecutive year of declining consumption in China.