October 13, 2025 • 10 mins
There’s a battle underway to win the energy export market between the world’s two largest economies: The US wants the world to buy its fossil fuels, while China wants to sell the world its clean energy technologies. For now, there is a clear winner: China. How did that happen? Akshat Rathi and Oscar Boyd discuss.
More:
- Read Akshat’s newsletter
- Read Ember’s report on electricity
- Subscribe to the Bloomberg Green newsletter
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd. Special thanks to Sommer Saadi, Mohsis Andam, Laura Millan and Sharon Chen. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Zero. I'm Oscar Boyd. Today a milestone for
clean tech. Hello Aksha Hi. So everyone listening will know
that you usually host this podcast, but they might not
know that you also regularly write a newsletter for Bloomberg Green.
And your most recent newsletter caught my eye. It's all
about China's energy exports. China is the leading export of
(00:23):
clean tech, as something we've discussed a lot of times
on Zero, and the US is one of the largest
exporters of fossil fuels globally. But you're the first person
that I've seen doing a comparison of the actual numbers
of these two countries exports. That was the subject of
your newsletter. What did you find?
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yes, So this is a weekly podcast. The newsletter is
daily and has a lot more ideas, so I hope
people will subscribe. Look, we cover climate tech on this
podcast fairly regularly, and we know that China is the
biggest producer of climate tech. But what I hadn't seen
was a comparison between these two numbers. Because we also
(01:00):
know that the US under this Donald Trump administration is
trying to boost its fossil fuel experts. Druill, Baby Drill,
not just that though, because Joe Biden was also helping
increase oil and gas exports. So we know that there
was an upward trend in US oil and gas exports,
but do they compare? And actually they do. I was
(01:21):
kind of surprised. So what I did was I picked
data that spoke to the strategic goals that the two
administrations were laying out. Donald Trump was saying, we would
like our allies or sometimes force them to buy our
fossil fuels, and China was saying, look, we have all
this clean tech. They will never say overcapacity, but you
(01:42):
know we have more production than we can consume. We
would like to export it to you. Who is buying what?
And China wins out like there's a clear winner, which
surprised me.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
And this is where we get into the narrative of
petro state versus electro state. Do you just want to
define what we mean by those two terms.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah, these terms are becoming more used, which is fun,
but definitions are important. A classic petro state definition is
a country that depends, for majority or like a heavy
percentage of their gross domestic product on fossil fuels, so
thirty percent or so you would typically think of a
Middle Eastern country as a petro state. But petro states
(02:21):
also have a certain characteristic They behave in a way
that they would like more people to buy their fossil fuels.
So the US doesn't fall in the category of having
a very large percentage of its GDP dependent on fossil fuels,
but it does fall in the category of wanting other
countries to buy fossil fuels, So the US is being
now more commonly called a petro state. Electrostate is a
(02:45):
new term. It's the term that says that that country
doesn't want to depend on petroleum, typically oil and gas,
but on electricity. That electricity may come from all sorts
of sources, may come from coal, but because electricity is
a form of energy that can be converted more efficiently
(03:06):
into other things, that country is making the bet that
electricity is what's going to power their economic growth, and
perhaps the electricity industries will become the export driver for
that country. And China is referred to as an electro state.
You could also think of Iceland or Norway, which are
heavily electric in their energy consumption total energy consumption, as
(03:30):
electro states, though they don't export that much.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
So you said you found a clear when in between
the two you said it was China. Give me the numbers.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
So the numbers really did surprise me. If you look
at twenty twenty five data, as of July, because that's
the latest data that we could find, China had exported
about one hundred and twenty billion dollars worth of clean
tech exports. And in that I'm counting batteries, electric cars,
solar panels, even electrical devices like transformers, wind turbines, and
(03:59):
US fuel exports just oil and gas, because we can
measure that pretty clearly, was about eighty billion dollars until July,
and actually China hit a record in August in its
clean tech exports almost twenty billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
So China exported in the first half of this year
alone forty billion dollars more in green tech than the
US did in fossil fuels. And you have a great
graph in your newsletter showing this. We'll put link in
the description for anyone who wants to see it, wants
to read it. Is this a new trend?
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Well, I thought it was new, but even twenty twenty four,
China just eked out ahead of the US in this comparison,
So China sold about one hundred and eighty billion dollars
worth of clean tech last year, whereas all of US
oil and gas exports came up to one hundred and
fifty billion dollars and worth. Noting oil was at a
much higher price in twenty twenty four than it is
(04:51):
this year. Is this difference between the US and China?
Is it going to stay or are we going to
see kind of the US now go turbomode and try
and increase its fossil fuels exports even further. So this
remains to be seen. There are different ways to count
the numbers that I have done. You could include uptree
midstream oil products. You could also include fossil fuel car exports,
(05:13):
which the US does export in quite a few numbers,
like many millions of cars, and that way you could
see that the US eeks out ahead of China. It
could also with this drill Baby drill mantra, just increase
a lot more of its oil and gas exports. There's
a limit because ramping that up, you know, requires private
industry to do it, whereas in China sometimes you can
(05:36):
get the government to decide that yes, we need to
export more and private industry follows. In the US, you'll
have to coax them to do it, and we have
seen that the oil and gas industry doesn't always play
ball with the administration. It does need to make money,
and so if the price of oil is too low,
we might not see that much rise in oil exports
(05:56):
from the US. But clearly there is a goal from
the administration to try and become a bigger fossil fuel exporter.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
And you noted earlier that the US is trying to
make its allies purchase its fossil fuels. Who's buying China's
green tech?
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Yes, so fossil fuels are consumed widely and that means
a lot of people by those fossil fuels. But for
the US, European Union is the biggest client for especially
liquified natural gas, but it's trying to sell it even
to China, Whereas for China, the customer base is also
pretty vast. Because developing countries are quite interested in clean
(06:33):
tech these days. We've talked about how Pakistan imported something
like twenty five percent of their entire power grid's capacity
in solar panels in one year in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
They're doing something similar with batch uses. Yeah right, that's right.
And this kind of story gets repeated in different countries
around the world. So the other chart that I was
pretty pleased to see in the story was this chart
of electric car exports to different parts of the world
coming from China, and how they start small and they
all super charge soon. So Asian about a billion dollars
(07:07):
worth of Chinese electric cars, Latam another billion dollars, Middle
East half a billion dollars, Africa two hundred million dollars
last year, but from really almost zero a couple of
years back. So we see from this data that China's
exporting this massive amount of clean tech around the world,
but actually primarily it's using a lot of it at home.
(07:29):
So most of the solar that it produces is installed
in China, most of the wind turbines that it produces
are installed in China. And last week we saw another
report from Member which made headlines, and this was talking
about the amount of electricity produced globally by renewables. What
did that report say?
Speaker 2 (07:43):
So, we have had a few times a day or
a month when the total amount of electricity made from renewables,
which is solar, wind, and hydro exceeded that from coal.
Coal for a very long time has been the large
source or fuel for electricity production. But Ember's support says
(08:04):
this first half of the year, so for six months
the renewables production exceeded coal, and if that continues for
the second half of the year, which it might, then
this becomes the first year when renewables will have produced
more electricity than coal, and it's what they call a
(08:25):
secular trend. This is likely to continue because renewables are
getting cheaper, are getting deployed much faster, even as we
do know that India and China and a few other
countries are building coal power plants.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
And this is really good news because obviously the other
thing about coal is it is the dirt is fuel.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah, of course, so coal for every unit of electricity
producers say x amount of missions, gas produces half that,
and renewables produce almost none of the carbon emissions, even
after accounting for all the carbon emissions that go into
production of renewables. So that is a very good story.
Some of it is, of course, gas swapping out coal,
(09:03):
and that doesn't mean it's going all clean, but it
is going slightly cleaner, and that story is something we
covered on the POT recently when we talked about the
gas turbine shortage.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
And there was another really interesting start in that report,
and that was saying that growth in solar and wind
generation outpaced the rise in global electricity demand. Why is
that important?
Speaker 2 (09:21):
One way in which people have talked about the energy
transition is to go from fossil fuels to clean energy.
But if you look at the numbers, it really has
been energy addition for most of it, because it's not
like the world is swapping out fossil fuels and using
renewables instead. It was just using all of it a
little more so now that renewables are growing faster than
electricity consumption growth overall, means renewables are starting to replace
(09:46):
fossil fuels in the entire global mix. Obviously, it happens
in rich countries. You know, the UK now has seventy
five percent of its electricity coming from renewables. Coal got
shut in twenty twenty four, So replacement has been happening
in many countries, but at a global level it was
an addition story. Now it might become a substitution story finally.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
So previously countries as they were developing. Their electricity demand
was growing, and solo was basically filling in that gap,
or renewables were basically filling in that gap, and some
fossil fuels and some fossil fuels. But now this report
is saying renewables are eating the lunch of fossil fuels,
starting to maybe nibbles, maybe little nibbles. Well, actually, thank
(10:29):
you very much for joining me on this special bonus
episode of Zero.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
This was a good fun chat.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
We'll put links to actac's newsletter and the Ember report
in the show notes. Thank you very much for listening,
and we'll be back later this week with a regular
episode of Zero.
Welcome to Zero. I'm Oscar Boyd. Today a milestone for
clean tech. Hello Aksha Hi. So everyone listening will know
that you usually host this podcast, but they might not
know that you also regularly write a newsletter for Bloomberg Green.
And your most recent newsletter caught my eye. It's all
about China's energy exports. China is the leading export of
(00:23):
clean tech, as something we've discussed a lot of times
on Zero, and the US is one of the largest
exporters of fossil fuels globally. But you're the first person
that I've seen doing a comparison of the actual numbers
of these two countries exports. That was the subject of
your newsletter. What did you find?
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yes, So this is a weekly podcast. The newsletter is
daily and has a lot more ideas, so I hope
people will subscribe. Look, we cover climate tech on this
podcast fairly regularly, and we know that China is the
biggest producer of climate tech. But what I hadn't seen
was a comparison between these two numbers. Because we also
(01:00):
know that the US under this Donald Trump administration is
trying to boost its fossil fuel experts. Druill, Baby Drill,
not just that though, because Joe Biden was also helping
increase oil and gas exports. So we know that there
was an upward trend in US oil and gas exports,
but do they compare? And actually they do. I was
(01:21):
kind of surprised. So what I did was I picked
data that spoke to the strategic goals that the two
administrations were laying out. Donald Trump was saying, we would
like our allies or sometimes force them to buy our
fossil fuels, and China was saying, look, we have all
this clean tech. They will never say overcapacity, but you
(01:42):
know we have more production than we can consume. We
would like to export it to you. Who is buying what?
And China wins out like there's a clear winner, which
surprised me.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
And this is where we get into the narrative of
petro state versus electro state. Do you just want to
define what we mean by those two terms.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah, these terms are becoming more used, which is fun,
but definitions are important. A classic petro state definition is
a country that depends, for majority or like a heavy
percentage of their gross domestic product on fossil fuels, so
thirty percent or so you would typically think of a
Middle Eastern country as a petro state. But petro states
(02:21):
also have a certain characteristic They behave in a way
that they would like more people to buy their fossil fuels.
So the US doesn't fall in the category of having
a very large percentage of its GDP dependent on fossil fuels,
but it does fall in the category of wanting other
countries to buy fossil fuels, So the US is being
now more commonly called a petro state. Electrostate is a
(02:45):
new term. It's the term that says that that country
doesn't want to depend on petroleum, typically oil and gas,
but on electricity. That electricity may come from all sorts
of sources, may come from coal, but because electricity is
a form of energy that can be converted more efficiently
(03:06):
into other things, that country is making the bet that
electricity is what's going to power their economic growth, and
perhaps the electricity industries will become the export driver for
that country. And China is referred to as an electro state.
You could also think of Iceland or Norway, which are
heavily electric in their energy consumption total energy consumption, as
(03:30):
electro states, though they don't export that much.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
So you said you found a clear when in between
the two you said it was China. Give me the numbers.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
So the numbers really did surprise me. If you look
at twenty twenty five data, as of July, because that's
the latest data that we could find, China had exported
about one hundred and twenty billion dollars worth of clean
tech exports. And in that I'm counting batteries, electric cars,
solar panels, even electrical devices like transformers, wind turbines, and
(03:59):
US fuel exports just oil and gas, because we can
measure that pretty clearly, was about eighty billion dollars until July,
and actually China hit a record in August in its
clean tech exports almost twenty billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
So China exported in the first half of this year
alone forty billion dollars more in green tech than the
US did in fossil fuels. And you have a great
graph in your newsletter showing this. We'll put link in
the description for anyone who wants to see it, wants
to read it. Is this a new trend?
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Well, I thought it was new, but even twenty twenty four,
China just eked out ahead of the US in this comparison,
So China sold about one hundred and eighty billion dollars
worth of clean tech last year, whereas all of US
oil and gas exports came up to one hundred and
fifty billion dollars and worth. Noting oil was at a
much higher price in twenty twenty four than it is
(04:51):
this year. Is this difference between the US and China?
Is it going to stay or are we going to
see kind of the US now go turbomode and try
and increase its fossil fuels exports even further. So this
remains to be seen. There are different ways to count
the numbers that I have done. You could include uptree
midstream oil products. You could also include fossil fuel car exports,
(05:13):
which the US does export in quite a few numbers,
like many millions of cars, and that way you could
see that the US eeks out ahead of China. It
could also with this drill Baby drill mantra, just increase
a lot more of its oil and gas exports. There's
a limit because ramping that up, you know, requires private
industry to do it, whereas in China sometimes you can
(05:36):
get the government to decide that yes, we need to
export more and private industry follows. In the US, you'll
have to coax them to do it, and we have
seen that the oil and gas industry doesn't always play
ball with the administration. It does need to make money,
and so if the price of oil is too low,
we might not see that much rise in oil exports
(05:56):
from the US. But clearly there is a goal from
the administration to try and become a bigger fossil fuel exporter.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
And you noted earlier that the US is trying to
make its allies purchase its fossil fuels. Who's buying China's
green tech?
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Yes, so fossil fuels are consumed widely and that means
a lot of people by those fossil fuels. But for
the US, European Union is the biggest client for especially
liquified natural gas, but it's trying to sell it even
to China, Whereas for China, the customer base is also
pretty vast. Because developing countries are quite interested in clean
(06:33):
tech these days. We've talked about how Pakistan imported something
like twenty five percent of their entire power grid's capacity
in solar panels in one year in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
They're doing something similar with batch uses. Yeah right, that's right.
And this kind of story gets repeated in different countries
around the world. So the other chart that I was
pretty pleased to see in the story was this chart
of electric car exports to different parts of the world
coming from China, and how they start small and they
all super charge soon. So Asian about a billion dollars
(07:07):
worth of Chinese electric cars, Latam another billion dollars, Middle
East half a billion dollars, Africa two hundred million dollars
last year, but from really almost zero a couple of
years back. So we see from this data that China's
exporting this massive amount of clean tech around the world,
but actually primarily it's using a lot of it at home.
(07:29):
So most of the solar that it produces is installed
in China, most of the wind turbines that it produces
are installed in China. And last week we saw another
report from Member which made headlines, and this was talking
about the amount of electricity produced globally by renewables. What
did that report say?
Speaker 2 (07:43):
So, we have had a few times a day or
a month when the total amount of electricity made from renewables,
which is solar, wind, and hydro exceeded that from coal.
Coal for a very long time has been the large
source or fuel for electricity production. But Ember's support says
(08:04):
this first half of the year, so for six months
the renewables production exceeded coal, and if that continues for
the second half of the year, which it might, then
this becomes the first year when renewables will have produced
more electricity than coal, and it's what they call a
(08:25):
secular trend. This is likely to continue because renewables are
getting cheaper, are getting deployed much faster, even as we
do know that India and China and a few other
countries are building coal power plants.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
And this is really good news because obviously the other
thing about coal is it is the dirt is fuel.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah, of course, so coal for every unit of electricity
producers say x amount of missions, gas produces half that,
and renewables produce almost none of the carbon emissions, even
after accounting for all the carbon emissions that go into
production of renewables. So that is a very good story.
Some of it is, of course, gas swapping out coal,
(09:03):
and that doesn't mean it's going all clean, but it
is going slightly cleaner, and that story is something we
covered on the POT recently when we talked about the
gas turbine shortage.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
And there was another really interesting start in that report,
and that was saying that growth in solar and wind
generation outpaced the rise in global electricity demand. Why is
that important?
Speaker 2 (09:21):
One way in which people have talked about the energy
transition is to go from fossil fuels to clean energy.
But if you look at the numbers, it really has
been energy addition for most of it, because it's not
like the world is swapping out fossil fuels and using
renewables instead. It was just using all of it a
little more so now that renewables are growing faster than
electricity consumption growth overall, means renewables are starting to replace
(09:46):
fossil fuels in the entire global mix. Obviously, it happens
in rich countries. You know, the UK now has seventy
five percent of its electricity coming from renewables. Coal got
shut in twenty twenty four, So replacement has been happening
in many countries, but at a global level it was
an addition story. Now it might become a substitution story finally.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
So previously countries as they were developing. Their electricity demand
was growing, and solo was basically filling in that gap,
or renewables were basically filling in that gap, and some
fossil fuels and some fossil fuels. But now this report
is saying renewables are eating the lunch of fossil fuels,
starting to maybe nibbles, maybe little nibbles. Well, actually, thank
(10:29):
you very much for joining me on this special bonus
episode of Zero.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
This was a good fun chat.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
We'll put links to actac's newsletter and the Ember report
in the show notes. Thank you very much for listening,
and we'll be back later this week with a regular
episode of Zero.
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