Prospects for Chinese Coke Sales to the USA: Illusions and Realities

摘要

The illusion is that Chinese sales of coke to the United States should be substantial in the next five years. 1. First, the Chinese are now the only major exporters of coke in the world, with the Japanese being a far distant second. 2. Second, cokemaking capacity in the USA has been reduced as both the integrated steelmakers and independent coke suppliers have shut a number of their facilities in the past year. In fact, more coke ovens may be closed in the next few years due to factors such as high costs and/or pollution control problems. 3. Third, existing USA integrated steel mills may need to operate at a high rate of capacity in the years ahead since underlying demand well exceeds domestic capacity and steel imports are already at high levels (and are unlikely to rise further). On this optimistic basis, it might be argued that China may need to supply three to four million tonnes of coke per year to the United States by about 2005. In comparison, total USA coke imports in 2001 were 2.1 million tonnes, with 0.9 million tonnes coming from China and 1.2 million tonnes coming from Japan.