A previous blog identified that the top 6 thermal coal exporting countries (Indonesia, Australia, Russia, Colombia, South Africa and United States) accounted for approximately 90% of the export coal market. A coal quality database that covers the top 6 exporting countries will be very useful as the data can be used to rank different coals, allow generic quality comparisons, development of correlations, market assessments and power plant modelling etc. A database was developed by linking coal quality data with an exporting coal mine located in one of the top 6 exporting countries. The export tonnage from each mine is known and contained within the database.The export mine data was purchased from Metalytics (http://www.coalcostcurves.com.au/) and relates to exports in 2015. The coal quality (CQ) data was obtained through internal sources, published databases and company research. A coking coal database was also developed and will be discussed in a separate blog.
The thermal coal mines are identified on the map below. As shown in the map, the mines are located in the major coal exporting countries.There are 259 coal exporting mines in the database. CQ data has been linked to 213 of these mines with calorific values ranging from 3,177kcal/kg ar to 7,962 kcal/kg. Mine exports ranged from 0.07Mt/yr to 39Mt/yr.The map also shows the import and export volumes of different countries.
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Comprehensive CQ data could not be obtained for all mines. Comprehensive data includes moisture, proximate analysis, ultimate analysis, HGI, calorific value, total sulfur, ash fusion temperatures, and ash chemistry. Partial CQ data was obtained for some mines which included moisture, proximate analysis, calorific value and total sulfur with details varying on a mine to mine basis e.g. some mine coal quality included HGI and others didn’t. A summary of the CQ coverage in the database is shown in the figure below. The data is broken in country categories. Total exports as reported by the IEA and as summarised from the coal export data is shown in the figure. There is some variation between the IEA data and totals from the coal export data, which is especially notable for Indonesia. The difference can be attributed to the challenge in collating individual mine export statistics in Indonesia. Overall export statistics can be collated via different methods (e.g. shipping statistics) and consequently the IEA statistics is believed to approximate actual country coal exports better than the total from the export mine database.
If the coal quality distribution for each country in the available database is assumed to represent the total exports for each country, then the exports from each mine can be normalised such that the total country exports will equal that estimated by the IEA. These, normalised database options are labelled as ‘Adjusted Mine Exports – Partial CQ’ and ‘Adjusted Mine Exports – Full CQ’ in the figure below. The validity of this assumption is strong for countries such as Australia, where coal quality data was identified for the majority of coal exporting mines. The validity of the assumption is smaller for countries such as Indonesia, where coal quality data could not be identified for a large number of mines, plus the total exports in the product database is less than the IEA estimation.
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The chart above shows that the product database covers Australia, Colombia, South Africa and the USA very well with
- very good comparison between the IEA export data and the export mine data and,
- good comparison between the linked coal quality data and mine data.
The data varies significantly for coals from Russia and especially for Indonesia. The Russia mine export data compares favourably with the IEA data, but not all of coal quality data for the Russian export coal mines could be found, just partial data could be identified. The same problem was found for Indonesian mines, some coal quality data could be found, but not complete datasets. The mine export data for Indonesia is significantly different from the IEA data which can be traced to the difficulty in sourcing specific mine export data.
The variation in mine exports categorized by country is shown in the figure below. Note that a log scale was used to spread out the data. A wide range of export values is shown, from 0.07Mt to 39Mt per year. Indonesia has 4 mines exporting greater than 10Mt/yr of thermal coal, Colombia has 3, Australia has 3 and Russia has 2.The product database has coal quality data for all coal mines with exports greater than 5Mt/year. Coal quality data is available for all exporting mines from Australia and Colombia. The exports varies for the other coal mines without coal quality data.
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The table below aggregates the count of laboratory parameters grouped by laboratory test group and country. The count can vary significantly between the different laboratory test groups. Ash fusion temperatures and ash analysis have the lowest count of available results.
The next blog will look at different coal quality characteristics of the blog, such as rank, calorific value, ash and moisture contents.