Our World
in Data
Data

Coal production

See all data and research on:
Energy

What you should know about this indicator

Includes commercial solid fuels only, i.e. bituminous coal and anthracite (hard coal), and lignite and brown (sub-bituminous) coal, and other commercial solid fuels. Includes coal produced for Coal-to-Liquids and Coal-to-Gas transformations.

Coal production
Measured in terawatt-hours.
Source
Energy Institute - Statistical Review of World Energy (2024); The Shift Data Portal (2019) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
June 20, 2024
Next expected update
June 2025
Date range
1900–2023
Unit
terawatt-hours

Related research and writing

legacy-wordpress-upload

Fossil fuels

Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy analyses data on world energy markets from the prior year.

Retrieved on
June 20, 2024
Retrieved from
https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Energy Institute - Statistical Review of World Energy (2024).

The data on energy production from fossil fuels provided by The Shift Data Portal is based on the following sources:

  • For the period 1900-1980: Bouda Etemad and Jean Luciani, World Energy Production 1900 - 1985, ISBN 2-600-56007-6, Data digitalized and published with agreement of B. Etemad.
  • For the period 1980-2016: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Historical Statistics for 1980-2016, accessed on 2019-06-05.
Retrieved on
December 12, 2023
Retrieved from
https://www.theshiftdataportal.org/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
The Shift Data Portal - Energy production from fossil fuels (2023).

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
  • The data is generated by combining the latest data from the Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy and The Shift Dataportal. The Energy Institute provides fossil fuel production data from 1965 onwards (and crude prices from 1861 onwards). The Shift Dataportal provides long-term data from 1900, but only extends to 2016. To maintain consistency with other energy data, we prioritize the Energy Institute data - meaning if they provide data for the given country and year, this data is used. Where data is not available from the Energy Institute for a given country, or pre-1965 we rely on data from The Shift Dataportal.
  • We have converted primary production in exajoules to terawatt-hours using the conversion factor: 1,000,000 / 3,600 ~ 278.
  • Production per capita has been calculated by dividing by our population dataset, based on different sources.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Coal production”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2023) - “Energy”. Data adapted from Energy Institute, The Shift Data Portal. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-production-by-country [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Energy Institute - Statistical Review of World Energy (2024); The Shift Data Portal (2019) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Energy Institute - Statistical Review of World Energy (2024); The Shift Data Portal (2019) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Coal production” [dataset]. Energy Institute, “Statistical Review of World Energy”; The Shift Data Portal, “Energy production from fossil fuels” [original data]. Retrieved June 30, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-production-by-country