In a word? Yes. King Coal will become Emperor Coal, and its migration to dictatorial status is well underway. It took China roughly 20 years to double their coal consumption from 1980 to 2000. They will nearly double that again by sometime this year, if they've not already. As an aside, China's crashing coal exports in the past 7 years have been a handy, back-door shorthand as to their total rising energy needs, and have been a reliable guide to the trend in their oil consumption.

GeoHive is a nice site:
http://www.xist.org/charts/en_coalcons.aspx

The FT in August of 2004 did a large piece on pan-Asia coal consumption, and the slated per annum buildout of coal fired electrical plants. They pegged that number at 1000 new plants over a 10 year period. That seemed extraordinary at the time, but lo and behold, the number for 2006 came in at 100. I remember doing a rough estimate of the Market Cap of the entire listed Coal Sector on US exchanges in 2003. It was barely pushing 12 billion. That quadrupled over 3 years into the highs of last Summer (2006).

I concluded after attending the recent ASPO meeting in Boston that coal was fated to be an interesting area, because it presented so many problems. Coal is a squeaky wheel indeed, and will only get louder.

What would China have done so far, without its coal, and how many of the 1000 slated coal fired plants will be built across Asia, before newer pollution-inhibiting technologies are integrated, not to mention gassification? My view is that Asia is reaching so hard for the coal, that all these Joint Venture Coal projects underway in CTL and Gassification will still be spitting out more data than product, as demand to burn coal the old-fashtoned way continues apace.

Anglo-American/Shell JV in Australia
http://www.monashenergy.com.au/

Gregor