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Notes -
You're right in geological terms, which I definitely missed in the original comment, but I think it's more circumstantial than "high demand for coal". Imperial China, for example, had similar issues with deforestation as Britain did, and had widespread adoption of coal both as a daily fuel and as a metallurgical resource in response to this especially in the Song dynasty; Marco Polo notes the predominance of coal as a fuel, for a European source that's a couple hundred years down the line.
I'm not completely sure why Britain had the need to artificially drain its waterlogged mines while China didn't, despite widespread use of coal. I do recall that the Chinese generally didn't employ shaft mining until quite late, that shaft mines would just be abandoned rather than drained even in the late Qing, and that some Chinese mines had relatively efficient natural drainage that made them less flood-prone; perhaps the geological details of the mines themselves, and the mining techniques necessary for them, were significant factors. I'm also of the impression that viable mines in Britain were able to be operated very close to waterways in a way that e.g. China's (or perhaps other European countries, as well) didn't, which may have lead to different financial bottlenecks.
Speculatively, I also wouldn't be surprised if coal and firewood consumption fell significantly, at least at a per capita level, after the Yuan (14th century or so), which would at least partially explain why there was lower demand for further improvements in mining.
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