Find your favourite indicator of fossil fuel prices. Let’s begin with the price of coal in China, where futures have surged to US$212 a metric tonne, up 20 per cent through September and 300 per cent over the past year.
Natural gas futures approached US$6 per British thermal unit. A litre of gasoline at some Toronto stations hit $1.40, a new high in nominal dollars as the price of crude oil hit US$80 a barrel. So what’s going on and what does it mean?
(Bloomberg) — It’s not just extra natural gas that Europe’s struggling energy markets are finding tough to get from Russia.
Power producers in the continent are being forced to ask Russia for more coal to ease an energy crunch with winter approaching and record-high gas prices denting profitability, according to officials at two Russian coal companies. But they may be left stranded as any increase in exports from the country won’t be substantial, they said.
LAUNCESTON, Australia (Reuters) – China is paying a high price for policies that curbed domestic coal output and imports, and led to a shortage of the fuel that still largely powers the world’s second-largest economy.
The good news for Beijing is that while the scarcity of coal will cause problems for energy-intensive industries, such as steel and aluminium, the situation is likely to be resolved relatively quickly.
GLACE BAY, N.S. — The whole country is watching the dramatic rescue of the Sudbury, Ont. miners with bated breath on Tuesday, but even more so in Maritime mining communities. As the workers continue to resurface, so too, are some strong feelings.
“You’re trying to put yourself in their place, the fear that they’re going through,” said Eric Spencer, a coal miner of 30 years in Glace Bay, NS. Spencer says for any miner, not being able to get back to the surface is their worst fear realized.
(Bloomberg) — South Africa’s mining industry has given its backing to moving the continent’s most developed economy away from coal but said it must be done gradually and responsibly.
In a presentation to the country’s Presidential Climate Change Coordinating Commission late last week the main body representing the industry said that 60% of the country’s $302 billion economy is reliant on energy produced from coal.
If the end of coal is near, it’s hard to see it among the open pits and billowing cooling towers of Victoria’s Latrobe Valley and the Hunter in NSW. Canyons of brown and black coal, set between green paddocks and sloping hills, loom large in these mining districts and dominate their economies as a source of great wealth, just as they have for a century or more.
A global push is accelerating to eliminate the use of thermal coal — the worst-emitting source of energy — to restrain the planet’s rising temperature and avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change.
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By now, coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, was supposed to be well on its way to the industrial graveyard. Thanks, you nasty old brute, you gave us a century and a half of cheap electric power; now your time is up, for the sake of the planet.
Yet like a senior citizen with a new heart transplant, coal is getting a second wind and refuses to die. Prices and demand are soaring and fleets of new coal plants are under construction in high-growth parts of the planet.
(Bloomberg) — China is at risk of the same energy-crunch chaos seen in Europe, with a state-run newspaper warning that coal-fired power plants will struggle to keep the lights on this winter.
The nation’s coal-based power producers, which account for more than 70% of the country’s electricity generation, are unable to buy enough fuel after prices surged, state-run China Energy News said in a report dated Sept. 18.
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Europe’s power crisis was just a matter of time – and that time has come. Natural gas and electricity prices are setting record highs virtually every day, and businesses and households have gone from getting annoyed to being terrified as the bills land like hand grenades.
The continent’s power system was an accident waiting to happen, in good part because its purported virtues – vast amounts of climate-friendly renewable energy and waning numbers of climate-unfriendly coal-fired plants – were less robust than advertised.
Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, said on Tuesday that his country would stop building coal-burning power plants overseas, a major shift by the world’s second-biggest economy to move away from its support of the fossil fuel.
China “will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad,” he told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. The news comes amid a broad international effort to reduce coal use and to keep global temperatures from rising at their current pace, which scientists have warned could be disastrous.
(Bloomberg) — There isn’t much that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Sierra Club agree on, but one of those rare things is a measure that’s part of the bipartisan infrastructure package to be considered by the U.S. House of Representatives later this month that would fund $11.3 billion to remediate coal mines abandoned before 1977.
It’s essentially a taxpayer subsidy of a polluting industry and yet it has plenty of support on both sides of the political aisle.
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Norman B. Keevil likely won’t be shedding any tears if Teck Resources Ltd. sells its core coal business. Teck’s chairman emeritus, who first joined Canada’s biggest base metals company in the 1960s, says Teck has always evolved with the times, dipping into one commodity, then moving on to another, based on market demand.
“You should read my book. It’s called Never Rest on Your Ores,” Mr. Keevil said in an interview. “Teck started as a gold company, and then it became a copper company.
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Teck Resources Ltd. has held talks with Lundin Mining Corp. and Glencore PLC as the Vancouver mining company continues to weigh its options for unloading its highly profitable but out-of-favour coal business.
Mining industry sources said that Teck chief executive officer Don Lindsay held deal talks with Toronto-based copper miner Lundin and Glencore, the Swiss mining and commodities trading giant, in the past year or so, but discussions with both companies ultimately went nowhere.
U.S. coal companies’ stock prices have rallied in 2021, and producers of the bulk commodity could book significant positive free cash flow in the second half of 2021 and in 2022.
Coal demand from power producers and steelmakers has been rebounding from lows hit during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, in part due to high natural gas prices and expectations of increased infrastructure spending.
SYDNEY (AFP, REUTERS) – Australia vowed on Thursday (Sept 9) to keep mining coal for export and said global demand was rising, rejecting a study that warned nearly all its reserves must stay in the ground to address the climate crisis.
Researchers warned in a study published in the journal Nature this week that 89 per cent of global coal reserves – and 95 per cent of Australia’s share – must be left untouched. Such restraint, they said, would still only offer a 50 per cent chance of limiting warming to 1.5 deg C above pre-industrial levels – the current global goal.
