After years of pain, coal becomes one of the hottest commodities of 2016

Less than a year after the coal industry was declared to be in terminal decline, the fossil fuel has staged its steepest price rally in over half a decade, making it one of the hottest major commodities.

Cargo prices for Australian thermal coal from its Newcastle terminal, seen as the Asian benchmark, have soared over 35 percent since mid-June to more than one-year highs of almost $70 a tonne, pushed by surprise increases in Chinese imports.

"Coal markets, after five years of declining prices, appear to have found a bottom in the first quarter," Australia's Whitehaven Coal said on Thursday, as its shares hit a three-year high on the release of its annual results.

"Reasons for the increase in prices include mine closures in Indonesia, United States and Australia and policy change by Chinese authorities," Whitehaven said, adding it was confident that coal prices will rise....

It was only a matter of time... The Chinese have built hundreds of new coal fired power plants in the past few years. They have had a new coal fired plant come on line every seven to ten days for years now. Japan and other Asian countries are also building a lot of new plants.

We have over 540 billion short tons of coal in known reserves in the United States, the actual amount is most likely higher. We currently use slightly more than 900 million short tons of coal per year to generate over 40% of our electricity consumption in the US. This is highly politicized so accurate figures are getting more and more questionable. This translates to well over 500 years worth of supply at current rates of consumption.

Coal is the most abundant reserve of energy that we have in this country. Attacks on coal are really thinly veiled attacks on the US energy sector and our ability to be energy self sufficient.

Re>So liberals have been trashing out our economy while China and India go full throttle, what a plan!!

The Chinese have always funded and supported the environmental movement. It took many of our factories away to China where they can pollute non stop. A brilliant successful move. Trump is correct when he says our leader are incompetent.

An accurate assessment and well stated.

Natural gas is too valuable to just burn and it will not be plentiful enough in the near long run to fuel our electricity needs.

With natural gas replacing coal as an electricity feed stock your electric rates will “necessarily skyrocket”. That is one thing obastard has said that is absolutely true.

What sucks is that about the time coal becomes a hot commodity china will have moved on to thorium reactors instead do to the us doe incompetence in handling osk ridge molyen salt reactor potential in the early 70s due to cronyism...

The problem with nuclear power in this country currently isn't the process used, or the availability of fuel. We have plenty of uranium to meet our nuclear energy needs into the foreseeable future. The problem currently is the perceived safety, which is what the environmental movement used to shut down the nuclear power industry and is using currently to shut down coal fired power plants using the “global warming” hoax. Thorium reactors create a similar amount of radioactive waste as uranium based solutions. The advantage is that Thorium is not a rare commodity, but that does not sit well with Democrat cronies who want to maintain high energy prices.

We have the technology and the resources to be “energy independent”. But the army of sheeple who are mustered by their leftist crony capitalist masters manage to shut down every option presented. Their masters have concluded that energy produced needs to be carefully throttled so that supply and demand will remain within a certain range to maintain its value. Wind and solar are no threat because neither is actually a viable source of reliable power and they are also a convenient means to funnel tax payer dollars into the hands of the those who contribute to the Democrats.

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