How UK farewell to coal – Insight from multi-regional input-output and logarithmic mean divisia index analysis

Highlights: • Carbon emission cannot decline without decline in coal consumption. • The essence of reducing coal consumption of UK should be considered more objectively and comprehensive. • From the global view, UK's consumption-based coal consumption first rise, then fall, while production-based one decline. • UK transferred the coal consumption from home country to the source country. • From the national view, the mainly inhibition effects are energy transformation and energy efficiency. Exploring the drivers of the decline in coal consumption in the United Kingdom (UK) may provide useful lessons for other countries, which want to control coal consumption and reduce carbon. This study investigated the key drivers of the decline in UK's production- and consumption-based coal consumptions from a global perspective, by combining the multi-regional input-output analysis and Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index methods. From a global view, both consumption- and production-based coal consumptions of UK declined during 1995–2009, except consumption-based coal consumption increased from 1995 to 2007. As a net importer, UK's coal consumption flows have been mainly embodied in exports for developed countries and embodied in imports from developing countries. On a national level, the offset effects of UK's coal consumption were from the energy transformations that reduced the proportions of coal consumption and general developments in the energy efficiency. It is found that its decline of coal consumption was only the superficial success, as the decrease actually was partly due to the transfers to other countries. But there are also lessons to be learned from that, because UK had also ultimately achieved the goal of using less energy consumption to generate higher gross domestic production, by technological improvements to promote an improvement in energy intensity. Therefore, coal consumption declined in the UK was the result of the combined effects of energy transition and outsourcing.