Canada news from the Canadian coal chain

摘要

With world coal prices settled, the only major unknown is what this year's coal volumes will be for the Canadian coal chain. Early last month, there was still no firm idea of what coal volumes would be for the year. Some of the uncertainty was removed late in March, when the world's major steelmaking coal producers, such as BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance (BMA) and, later, Canada's Teck Coal, settled for prices of up to 129 US dollars/t, depending on coal quality. This represented a drop in the benchmark price of high quality met coal of 57 percent, reflecting a return to 2005 pricing, and was seen as inevitable following last year's record 300 US dollars/t, when extreme weather conditions combined for a perfect storm that resulted in 8 - 10 million t of steelmaking coal being lost to the market.