Episode 20 - Global Supply Realignment and Support Floors in Global Coal Markets

Uh, you wanna start us off with met coal or, uh, or you guys wanna hear thermal coal?

I'll go ahead and run down on the met side.

Just from, uh, just from a pricing perspective, PLV has basically gone nowhere over the past couple of weeks.

I think the front-month contract is up maybe point one percent.

But the bigger story is, as the, uh, the accident in Shanxi Province in China, as we've gotten further away from that, from that incident, they've brought more and more mines back to production.

And the price, you know, movement that we saw that, uh, that pushed us up north of two fifty, uh, has kind of backed off.

And the further out the curve, we're looking more like two forty-six to two forty-eight instead of two fifty like we were seeing before, which, you know, still comports with seasonal, you know, seasonal trends because we don't really get the, the market moving until late July, early August anyway.

So, uh, I'd say the, uh, you know, the, the up cycle has kind of been postponed until normal times for now, and we're relaxing back to normal.

But, um, what's, uh, what's happening on the thermal coal side?

Yeah, you know, it's not, it's not too different.

Basically, things are... things have settled down a little bit.

There's no more panic in the market in terms of gas prices and ga-- LNG availability.

So that naturally brought, uh, coal prices down somewhat.

You know, most I'm looking at the, our price screen, our thermal coal intelligence screen on thecoaltrader.com. We got mostly red on there across Newcastle, API2, Richards Bay, and Indonesia over the last week.

And, you know, same on, uh, a little bit more green on the monthly changes.

But the, the whole thermal coal complex is kinda moving down with the gas complex.

The fundamentals are still pretty good, though.

Uh, we're in summer.

Summer is-- Summer is hot.

We're talking about, uh, an El Niño hitting, um, Northern Hemisphere.

You know, Europe is in a massive heatwave.

You know, to go through some of the news here, the, uh, French nukes have been, uh, curtailed at the same time as this heatwave.

Uh, they're down more than four gigawatts.

And France usually exports power, so we got the German coal plants picking up, gaining eight gigs of load.

Uh, Poland, we got European coal plants, uh, still active.