Hopes that rising Indian coal demand would insulate Australian miners from slowing consumption in China has been knocked down as "superficial analysis" by new research, which also casts doubt on the prospects for LNG. 
In a report delivered at its Shanghai conference on Tuesday, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said India's thermal coal imports would peak next year and it was on track to be self sufficient by 2023.
"The growth in India's coal consumption is not going to be met by the seaborne market [imports]," said Kobad Bhavnagri, the Australian head of Bloomberg's research and consulting arm.
"The idea that as China's coal demand slows India opens up as an export market looks to be pretty superficial analysis."
The firm is forecasting India's electricity demand to increase more than three-fold over the next 35 years.
It believes much of this will be met by burning coal, but it will be domestically produced coal rather than imports from Australia or Indonesia.
On Bloomberg's analysis, Asia will still be burning as much coal in 2040 as it does today, but the big growth markets in Indian and South East Asia will be domestically supplied.
"From an emission point of view the world is going from a China coal problem in the 2000s to an Indian coal problem in the 2020s," he said.
While China's carbon emissions are set to peak around 2020, India's are set to rise three and half times between 2014 and 2040 as it ramps up coal fired generation.
"The next great strategic challenge for the world is how to get India to develop more cleanly," he said.
Australian coal exporters have been badly hurt by falling demand in China this year, as the economy slows and Beijing begins to tackle its chronic air pollution.
Imported coal volumes fell 30 per cent in   September compared to the same period in 2014, while China's overall coal use was down 5.7 per cent over the same timeframe.
That has left China's coal-fired power plants running at a utilisation rate of just 49.5 per cent in the year to   September.

 And in a further blow to Australia, Bloomberg believes it will be renewables, not LNG which sits beside coal as the region's major energy source.
"It [LNG] can't compete with coal on price and it has to be imported so does meet the demands of domestic energy security," said Mr Bhavnagri.
Bloomberg is forecasting LNG demand to grow by 31 per cent over the next 25 years, which is far slower than other projections which had forecast a doubling or even more over the period.
"It's a pretty bad story for Australian LNG hopes," said Mr Bhavnagri. "The energy mix is going to be coal plus renewables for Asia."
Bloomberg believes 67 per cent of all new electricity generation capacity in Asia will be renewables by 2040 with solar and wind dominating.
In India, for example, it believes newly installed solar and wind generation capacity will be double that of additional coal capacity by 2040.
In China this shift will be more pronounced with new renewables and nuclear capacity being triple new coal capacity.