{"id":15512,"date":"2015-12-21T12:56:49","date_gmt":"2015-12-21T17:56:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15512"},"modified":"2015-12-21T12:56:49","modified_gmt":"2015-12-21T17:56:49","slug":"coal-minings-financial-failures-two-thirds-of-worlds-production-now-unprofitable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15512","title":{"rendered":"Coal Mining&#8217;s Financial Failures: Two Thirds of World&#8217;s Production Now Unprofitable"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 id=\"page-title\" class=\"page__title title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.desmogblog.com\/2015\/12\/21\/coal-s-financial-fail-two-thirds-world-s-production-now-unprofitable\" target=\"_blank\">Coal Mining&#8217;s Financial Failures: Two Thirds of World&#8217;s Production Now Unprofitable<\/a><\/h3>\n<article class=\"node-10165 node node-blog node-promoted view-mode-full clearfix\">\n<header>\n<p class=\"submitted desktop-only\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.desmogblog.com\/sites\/beta.desmogblog.com\/files\/styles\/full_width_blog_image\/public\/blogimages\/shutterstock_180341417_0.jpg?itok=yjLrmkwu\" alt=\"\" width=\"826\" height=\"551\" \/><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"horizontal-social-bar horizontal-social-bar-top clearfix\">\n<div class=\"horizontal-share-left\">Sixty-five percent of the world&#8217;s coal production is unprofitable at today&#8217;s prices, a new research report by Wood Mackenzie, a commercial intelligence company often cited by investment analysts and the coal industry itself,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/business\/mining-and-resources\/wood-mackenzie-estimates-that-65pc-of-world-coal-output-is-lossmaking-20151209-gljxj4.html\" target=\"_blank\">concluded<\/a>.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden\">\n<div class=\"field-items\">\n<div class=\"field-item even\">\n<p>Both major types of coal \u2014 the coking coal used for making steel and the thermal coal burned in coal-fired electrical power plants \u2014 were included in Wood Mackenzie&#8217;s analysis. The estimate may be conservative, as the group excluded some costs incurred during mining, and focused primarily on the sharp drop in the price of\u00a0coal.<\/p>\n<p>Demand for thermal coal is also expected to slump further, in part because coal-fired power plants are expected to be required to meet increasingly strict standards for their emissions of toxic air pollution and greenhouse\u00a0gasses.<\/p>\n<p>And coking coal, which often sells for more than thermal coal, has been hard hit by the sudden downturn of China&#8217;s steel industry, which makes roughly half of the world&#8217;s\u00a0steel.<\/p>\n<p>A recovery for the steel industry may not come for years, analysts say. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t help that Chinese steel production is about to see the most dramatic decline to the lowest in 20 years,\u201d Herman Hildan, an Oslo-based analyst at Clarksons Platou Securities,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2015-12-15\/shipping-index-plunges-to-fresh-record-amid-china-steel-slump\" target=\"_blank\">told<\/a>\u00a0Bloomberg News about the steel industry&#8217;s prospects. \u201cDemand growth is\u00a0collapsing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Prices for some types of coking coal have already plunged more than 75 percent since\u00a02011.<\/p>\n<p>The Wood Mackenzie analysts concluded that now, \u201cmore than 65 per cent of world coal production operates at a\u00a0loss.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The situation is even more grim for some American coal mining regions, like Central Appalachia, where Wood Mackenzie concluded in March that 72 percent of the coal produced was being sold at a\u00a0loss.<\/p>\n<p>The firm does not expect a turnaround for the coal industry anytime\u00a0soon.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe&#8217;re bearish on 2016,\u201d Matt Preston, who manages North American coal research at Wood Mackenzie,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/billingsgazette.com\/news\/state-and-regional\/wyoming\/coal-s-struggles-likely-to-continue-in\/article_e8125f1b-62d6-5897-8143-8728462ec0af.html\" target=\"_blank\">told<\/a>\u00a0The Billings\u00a0Gazette.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Coal Mining&#8217;s Financial Failures: Two Thirds of World&#8217;s Production Now Unprofitable Sixty-five percent of the world&#8217;s coal production is unprofitable at today&#8217;s prices, a new research report by Wood Mackenzie, a commercial intelligence company often cited by investment analysts and the coal industry itself,\u00a0concluded. Both major types of coal \u2014 the coking coal used for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[147,4292,5317,1980,11167],"class_list":["post-15512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-coal","tag-coal-industry","tag-desmog-blog","tag-profit","tag-sharon-kelly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15512"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15513,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15512\/revisions\/15513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}