The global pipeline of proposed coal mine capacity grew nearly 11% in 2025, reaching 2,521 million tonnes per annum (Mtpa), per the latest Global Coal Mine Tracker from Global Energy Monitor — and almost all of that increase came from one country. India's proposed capacity climbed from 329 Mtpa in 2024 to 638 Mtpa in 2025, enough on its own to explain why the global figure moved at all.
The timing is what makes this worth pausing over. Global coal demand grew by less than half a per cent last year and is expected to flatten through the decade, per the IEA. Wind and solar overtook coal in the global electricity mix for the first time in 2025, and coal-fired generation fell 0.6% worldwide, according to Ember data cited in a recent report.
The Union Ministry of Coal has set a target of roughly 1.15 billion tonnes of raw coal production for FY2025-26, rising to 1.5 billion tonnes by FY2029-30, citing heatwave-driven demand, industrial growth and energy security.
Jharkhand and Odisha accounted for most of the surge, with proposed projects in the two states roughly doubling year on year, per the same GEM analysis.
"Energy security planning in India still has to account for the fact that renewables cannot yet guarantee round-the-clock supply during peak summer demand," said a senior official at the Coal Ministry familiar with the coal sector's production targets. "The mine pipeline reflects that caution, not a rejection of the transition."
The pipeline is mostly still paper
Of India's 638 Mtpa in proposed capacity, only about 101 Mtpa — roughly 16% — has actually reached construction or trial operation, according to GEM's breakdown. China's 1,321 Mtpa pipeline stayed flat, but 557 Mtpa of it — 71% of its late-stage capacity — is already under construction.
India's expansion is overwhelmingly still a plan rather than a fact on the ground, though most of its late-stage capacity is quicker-to-build surface mining, so whatever share does advance could move fast. That gap is what worries researchers tracking stranded-asset risk: globally, nearly 70% of the pipeline remains pre-construction, the point at which cancellation is still cheapest.
Coal's stubborn grip on the grid
The underlying demand picture is not imaginary. In July 2026, coal still accounted for about 65.7% of India's electricity generation even as renewables hit record levels and supplied roughly 20% of the mix — installed solar and wind capacity, now above 274 GW, has not yet translated into an equivalent share of actual generation.
Indoen Energy has previously examined how this flexibility gap, not land or financing, is now the binding constraint on renewable build-out.
There is also a less obvious driver: coal as feedstock, not just fuel. In May, the government approved a ₹37,500 crore (US$3.9 billion) scheme to incentivise coal and lignite gasification, targeting conversion of roughly 75 million tonnes annually into syngas for urea, ammonia and methanol — cutting reliance on imported LNG.
India's high-ash coal makes gasification costlier than with imported coal, and such projects typically take five to eight years to build, so this second constituency will not absorb new capacity quickly.
The methane accounting nobody is doing
A less examined dimension: methane released during mine construction. Indian operators are currently permitted to vent this gas into the atmosphere without mitigation, even as China and Australia's New South Wales move to legislate mandatory capture.
GEM estimates 4,481 kilotonnes of coal mine methane could be recovered globally each year at negative net cost — roughly 6.6 billion cubic metres of gas, about 6% of the supply disrupted during this year's Strait of Hormuz tensions, an episode Indoen Energy covered in detail earlier this year.
For a gas-import-dependent country, that is an odd stream to leave unpriced.
The stranded-asset question
None of this makes India's coal expansion irrational on its own terms.
A country adding population, industrial capacity and cooling load faster than almost anywhere else has legitimate reasons to want supply-side insurance, and the global coal demand plateau forecast by the IEA says little about India's own trajectory, where demand is still rising even as it falls in China and the OECD.
But a pipeline that is 84% unbuilt, financed against a 2030 demand curve most forecasters expect to flatten, is the kind of bet that looks prudent while planning and can look expensive a decade later.
"A mine that exists only on paper carries very different risk to one with steel in the ground," said a researcher at a New Delhi-based energy think tank. "The concern is less about the 638 Mtpa figure itself and more about how much of it eventually gets financed against a demand curve that may not be there when it's built."
The next two or three years — when permits convert to construction, or don't — will decide which description turns out to be right.
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