U.S. coal prices soared past $200 per ton last week, according to new data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Spot Central Appalachia coal prices climbed to $204.95 per ton for the week ended Sept. 30, up more than 3 percent from the previous week. That’s the highest price since 2005.
Newcastle coal futures, the benchmark for Asia, touched a record high of nearly $450 per ton, before easing to around $400. [bold, links added]
Domestic coal production has been holding steady. EIA numbers show that U.S. coal output totaled 12.1 million short tons, up 1.9 percent year over year.
In addition, year-to-date coal production totaled nearly 438 million short tons, up close to 4 percent from the same time a year ago. (A short ton, or just ton in the United States, equals 2,000 pounds. A long ton, used in the UK, is 2,240 pounds.)
In 2021, coal represented more than one-fifth (22 percent) of U.S. electricity generation, behind natural gas (38.3 percent). By comparison, wind and solar accounted for just 9.2 percent and 2.8 percent, respectively, last year.
But the fuel source has been surging on strengthening global demand, particularly as the Northern Hemisphere braces for cold and snowy weather.
Global Energy Demand Crunch
S&P Global data note that total spot transaction volumes rose 22 percent in the third quarter, up from the April–June period.
In July, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projected in a market update that worldwide coal consumption would return to all-time highs in 2022.
“Global coal demand is being propped up this year by rising natural gas prices, which have intensified gas-to-coal switching in many countries, as well as economic growth in India.
Those factors are being partly offset by slowing economic growth in China and by the inability of some major coal producers to ramp up production,” the IEA stated in its report.
Indeed, Chinese coal imports slumped about 15 percent year over year in August. Beijing’s zero-COVID strategy has resulted in lockdowns in multiple pockets of the country, which has weakened economic growth and applied pressure on demand for a broad array of commodities, from soybeans to crude oil to coal.
However, that’s been offset by robust European demand. In the first half of the year, coal was Germany’s largest source of energy production, representing almost 30 percent, according to confirmed data from the Institute for Energy Research (IER).
That’s a result of the European Union’s (EU) ban on Russian coal imports, forcing eurozone members to search for alternative sources.
Moscow had provided approximately 70 percent of the EU’s thermal coal prior to the restrictions. In the first seven months of 2022, Australia exported 2.9 million metric tons of coal to Europe, up 73 percent from all of 2021.
European seaborne thermal coal demand is also forecast to increase by 14 percent, or 12 million metric tons, in 2022.
“With many European nations increasing thermal coal use, an additional nine gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired capacity has been made available to meet energy demands and make up for the decline in Russian energy imports. Coal prices are surging, but they are still more affordable than record-high [natural] gas prices,” Adam Woods, Wood Mackenzie’s senior research analyst, wrote in a recent research note.
It isn’t only European households that have been struggling. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association warned that more than 20 million U.S. households are behind on their utility bills.
The organization estimates that the average cost of home heating during the winter season will rise more than 17 percent, to $1,202, the highest in a decade (pdf).
Electricity costs surged close to 16 percent on an annualized basis in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Thermal coal power plant image by Josep Monter Martinez from Pixabay
Read rest at Epoch Times
So dose Biden the Bumbler want us to copy the mistake of the EU? Biden is a idiot just like the rest of the Liberal DNC
If the Democrats get their way, narcotics will be legalized and coal will become a Schedule 1 controlled substance.
It will be interesting to see what the impact of the energy shortage, and in the EU energy crisis, will be on COP 27. This is the big UN conference on climate change. Cop 27 is only a month away, starting on November 6 and is scheduled to end on November 18. This will be the twentieth such meeting that I have closely followed. From what I have been able to gather the goals of COP 27 are similar to past meetings. With goals to continue to reduce the use of fossil fuels, what will the reaction be of nations that are desperate for energy?
The US election is on November 8 two days after the conference starts. If it goes as expected I’m sure it will loudly echo at the conference. The average price of gas today in the US is 13% higher than during COP 26, and 45% higher than when Biden took office with the pledge to end fossil fuel use.
Joe Biden has got to be the stupidest president the US has ever elected. This shouldn’t be surprising in the modern failure of the dumbing down of America by left-wing media and grade school education. Because rather than teaching our kids even the basic science of the environment, such as what makes it green? (answer: the green-pigmented enzyme chlorophyll) What green process converts sunlight energy, CO2, and water into life on earth (answer: photosynthesis)? What is the original source of the energy in fossil fuels (answer: the sun)? What two life-essential molecules are recycled back to the environment by using fossil fuels (answer: CO2 and water – MAKING COAL, OIL, AND GAS OUR ONLY GREEN ENERGY)! Our entire modern civilization is based on energy. Energy, and its dependent technologies like modern agriculture, have made us the best-fed, longest-living, most prosperous human beings that have ever existed. AND our energy-driven modern civilization makes us ten times safer from the climate than we were a century ago. Yet the climate cult wants you to believe that fossil fuels recycling of the rarest and most important ingredient of earth’s carbon-based life – CO2 (which is ALL LIFE) – is somehow “pollution”! The dumbing down of some of the richest countries in the world – who have been lied to about energy, climate, and our carbon-based life for decades. Is the climate warming – yes. Is more life essential 0.04% CO2 the cause – not even a little. There is fifty times more life-essential CO2 dissolved in water than there is in the atmosphere – thank goodness. Earth is in a 3 million year, ongoing Pleistocene Quaternary Ice Age. The normal, natural ongoing temperature range of our climate is 12° C. It warms and cools that much every one hundred thousand years. That cycle is driven by Milankovitch’s Eccentricity. The warmest four degrees C of each cycle is called interglacial cycles. Each one lasts about 15,000 years. The warmest four degrees C of each Milankovitch Eccentricity cycle we call interglacial. In this Holocene interglacial we invented civilization. But this is far from the first. There have been about thirty 15,000 year interglacial periods during our current ongoing ice age. And during interglacial periods, there is a normal, natural 4° C, nine hundred year warming and cooling cycle Dr. Judith Curry calls “Eddy cycles”. There have been about five hundred of them during this ice age. The latest warming half of this natural warming/cooling cycle has had us warming since the “Little Ice Age” of the 1600s. Sometime in the next few decades, our current warming trend will turn into a 450 year cooling trend. And cold is 85 times more deadly than heat. A word about the corruption of climate science used to indoctrinate schoolchildren. Shakun’s team used several different scales to contrive a graph suggesting climate is warming unnaturally today. It isn’t. And Shakun himself admits it. This graph has been used to indoctrinate schoolchildren into the climate cult. “The squad” preaches their lives will be cut short because of a CO2 driven climate. They are completely unaware that EVERY ONE OF THE OVER 100 CO2-DRIVEN CLIMATE MODELS EXAGGERATE PROJECTED TEMPERATURES when compared to weather balloon and satellite data. And have done for thirty years! As Sean Hannity calls it, we live in the age of a climate cult. Want the truth? Check out Drs. Tim and his son David Ball, John Christy, Roy Spencer, and Judith Curry. They actually know what they’re talking about.
Excellent Barry, Kudos,
The 2.5M years of the Pleistocene in analogy is the teeth of of saw. The Holocene is no different and diurnal cycles match.
Look at the Vostok/Epica graphs. They are consistent in ~10C temp rises/falls. The Co2 varies with the former at 100ppm and the latter at 165 ppm. The ratios would be 10 and 16.5/1C.
The present hand wavium is a 135ppm rise for a 1.1C rise. Please explain.
Cheers
A year ago I was reading about the move to phase out coal. The European Union committed to the COP 26 mandate to completely stop using coal. It is amusing what happens when reality collides with the plans made by the elites.