The massive spike in coal demand is putting supply chains under pressure and miners are becoming captive to infrastructure inadequacies to cope with ramped up mine output. While Australia may have bureaucratic problems, Indonesia faces the challenge of remote sites and difficult transport links to the load out ports.
In its just-released 2004 annual report Xstrata Coal noted that the thermal coal demand in the Far East and Australia rose eight per cent last year but “supply constraints in Australia relating to infrastructure, together with selfimposed export quotas in China, allowed Indonesia to continue its strong export growth and claim most of the expansion of the 2004 marketplace.”...
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This complete item is approximately 1625 words in length, and appeared in the March/April 2005 issue of CoalTrans International, on page 20.
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