The US coal mining industry is unable to expand production to replace Russian coal on the European market, the country’s biggest exporter said on Tuesday. The USA is among the world’s top five coal exporters, and sells most of its coal to India, Brazil and South Korea.
The comment follows a proposal by the European Commission to impose a ban on coal imports from Russia as part of a wider package of sanctions on Moscow over Ukraine.
According to Thrasher, most of the US coal output has already been sold under long-term contracts and there are few spare tons to deliver to Europe.
With coal being the dirtiest fossil fuel, there has been little investment in new capacity, he explained, adding that tight labor markets and supply-chain bottlenecks caused by the coronavirus pandemic would also make it difficult to deliver extra tons for export.
According to media reports, potential buyers from some EU countries have already approached Indonesia and Australia, the world’s largest thermal coal exporters.
But those countries have limited capacity as well. The EU wants to move away from Russian supplies, which meet 70% of Europe’s demand for thermal coal.
Shares of US coal miners surged after the European Union announced its sanctions plan against Russia on Tuesday. Coal prices in the USA have been on the rise, surpassing $100 a ton last week for the first time since 2008.
RT. com / ABC Flash Point Mineral News 2022.
This is the main problem with US Government they are destroying our country by killing off the very industries that brought US their wealth and power. The USA is in a perpetual trade deficit with every country in the world and all we had to do was to build our energy sector and our ENERGY EXPORTS! to EU and China and the rest of the world and become ENERGY DOMINANT and balance our trade deficit. This is what Trump wanted to do but instead the green assholes have been collapsing the whole industry and we don’t have any volume to… Read more »
We don’t want coal, unlike Russia and China, the west is moving away from fossil fuels, wind, solar and nuclear energy is the future. So this is in fact pushing the west into the direction it wants to go anyway.
Hahaha, but first the people have to suffer and live in the cold for the next 5 years?
Moving away from fossil fuels – how are you going to do that, build a few windmills? Give me a break.
I guess this attack on Russia, via Ukraine, is also an indirect attack on Europe (-which is another rival to the US dominance in the world), through the sanctions the US demands the EU make against Russia -which always affect the EU more than Russia! So, it is not surprising the US is not particularly willing to help Europe over its coal shortage and will only sell LPG to Europe at sky high prices. Europe should know who its real friends are by now from experience over the last decade or so, but it seems to know nothing and learns… Read more »
The Zionist supported regimes are signing their own death warrants?