Tuesday, 4 August 2026

A push to salvage the 1.5C warming limit has laid bare a split over the future of coal, oil and gas, with climate-vulnerable nations seeking a faster move away from those fuels and major emerging economies and producers resisting any focus on particular energy sources, Climate Home News reported.

The process at the centre of the dispute is the Belem Mission to 1.5, launched at COP30 to address the global shortfall in climate ambition.

The like-minded developing countries bloc, which counts China and India among its members, and Arab states led by Saudi Arabia have warned against singling out specific energy sources within the mission, according to Climate Home News.

On the other side of the argument, the Marshall Islands has put forward a global commitment to build no new oil, coal and gas infrastructure as part of the mission.

The ambition gap the process was set up to close is wide. Full implementation of current pledges is expected to hold warming to only around 2.3-2.5 C by 2100, Climate Home News reported, citing the UN.

The initiative is due to culminate in a report at COP31 setting out priority actions for keeping the 1.5C goal within reach.

Seven coking coal mines account for 81% of India's total coking coal methane emissions of 138.3 kilotonnes per year, according to a new study from IEEFA that tracked 30 mines. IEEFA found around 87% of India's abatable coking coal mine methane can be cut for less than USD 20 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent, in line with global estimates.

Existing abatement technologies could remove roughly 105 kilotonnes of methane per year from the mines IEEFA tracked. That places the bulk of the reduction opportunity inside a cost band that carbon markets and compliance regimes routinely clear.

The wider emissions picture is larger. According to the IEA's Global Methane Tracker 2026, India's coking coal mining released around 234.7kt of methane in 2025, at a methane intensity of 5.1kg CH4 per tonne of coal, 50% higher than the 3.4kg intensity of steam coal.

The study lands against an expansion policy. India launched Mission Coking Coal in 2021 with the goal of more than doubling domestic coking coal production by FY2030. IEEFA's argument is that methane abatement should be embedded in that build-out rather than retrofitted later.

Demand-side substitution changes the arithmetic sharply. The scrap-based electric arc furnace route requires 12 kg of coking coal per tonne of steel, against 770 kg for the conventional blast furnace route. The Indian government is targeting 50% of steel production fed by scrap metal by 2047, up from 23% now.

One domestic producer has already tested capture at the point of use. In 2022, Tata Steel became the world's first steel producer to pilot continuous injection of coal bed methane into a blast furnace, at its Jamshedpur plant in Jharkhand.

Zambia and Zimbabwe together accounted for more than two-thirds of all new coal power proposals announced across Africa in 2025, according to Global Energy Monitor's Boom and Bust Coal 2026 report cited by Mongabay.

Both countries lean heavily on water for electricity. Mongabay reported that more than 80% of Zambia's power supply and about half of Zimbabwe's came from hydropower in 2024.

That dependence turned into a supply failure. Successive droughts linked to the 2023-24 El Niño pulled down water levels in Lake Kariba, formed by a dam on the Zambezi River, and drastically reduced generation, precipitating what Mongabay described as one of the region's worst energy crises in decades. Households faced power cuts lasting up to 18 hours a day.

The Kariba hydroelectric complex has been operational since 1960, and its output is split equally between the two countries. A single reservoir therefore sets the generation ceiling on both sides of the border at once, which is why one drought produced two national shortages.

Rooftop solar has taken up part of the gap in Zimbabwe. Kudakwashe Manjonjo of Power Shift Africa told Mongabay that about six to eight percent of the country's electricity now comes from net-metering systems, a billing arrangement under which households generate their own power with solar panels and feed surplus output back into the national grid.

The coal pipeline sits alongside that distributed solar growth rather than replacing it. Global Energy Monitor's count measures proposals announced, not plants built, and the two countries' share of the continent's new announcements marks a shift in where African coal planning is now concentrated.