South Korea will lean more heavily on coal and nuclear generation this winter to reduce liquefied natural gas consumption, Climate, Energy and Environment Minister Kim Sungwhan told Bloomberg in an interview published on Friday, as reported by OilPrice.com. With Qatari supply cut off by the Middle East crisis and spot LNG prices at levels that make gas fired plants uneconomical against coal, the minister said gas use has to fall in the short term, with renewables expanded rapidly alongside heavier use of nuclear and coal.
The substitution is already visible in the data cited in the report: coal fired power supply in South Korea rose 40 percent in April, the biggest jump since August 2019, after gas fired generation fell sharply earlier in the crisis. LNG prices at four year highs are feeding directly into electricity prices.
Seoul is pairing the short term reversal with a long term plan to invest as much as one quadrillion won, about 747 billion dollars, in renewables, electric vehicles and industrial decarbonisation by 2035. For this winter, though, energy security comes first, and coal is the swing fuel.