By Brooklyn Guillory, Argus Media Ltd.

Emerging markets

The US has developed into a crucial base supplier of coal to European, South American and Asian markets hungry for reliable and competitively priced tonnage. The shift differs from other recent export booms, when coking coal fueled the surge. Now, demand for US steam coal is jumping, even as new environmental rules make generators here look to alternative energy sources.

More and more South African coal is headed to Asia, raising prices for that supply and encouraging European generators to seek alternatives from Central Appalachia and the Illinois Basin. Meanwhile, US producers including Peabody Energy, [...]

Energy Riches Attract Neighbors and Outside Interests

By John C.K. Daly, Oilprice.com

Pity poor Mongolia, bereft of fiscal resources, caught between the ambitions of its superpower neighbors, Russia and China.

Ulaan Bator’s situation is akin to interwar Poland, dexterously attempting to reconcile its foreign policy between the USSR’s hammer and Nazi Germany’s hard place. Who will ultimately benefit is anyone’s guess, but the country’s nascent energy and mineralogical riches have opened the land of Genghis Khan to a fierce bidding war whose ultimate outcome is unclear at best.

The nation is essentially empty, its 2.8 million citizens producing an average population density of just [...]

Comments of Representative Doug Lamborn to the American Coal Council’s Coal Market Strategies Conference

Congressman Doug Lamborn. 5th District of Colorado in the US House of Representatives August 23, 2011

Editor’s note: We invited Congressman Doug Lamborn (R-CO) to speak to the attendees of our 2011 Coal Market Strategies conference, held Aug. 22 to 24 in Colorado Springs, CO. A portion of the Congressman’s speech is reprinted below.

While there is no escaping the very real threat posed by anti-coal regulations and government action that has been aimed at “bankrupting the coal industry,” we can’t forget that our industry is populated by thousands of [...]