Coking Coal Prices To Rise As Supplies Likely To Remain Tight - Analysts

Coking coal supplies are likely to remain tight for another three months and prices may rise by a third from about $300 a metric ton now after floods in Australia's Queensland state hit output of the key steelmaking raw material, industry analysts said Tuesday.

Mines in Queensland supply two-thirds of the most-valued hard coking coal traded in the global seaborne market and they are unlikely to return to full-scale operations in the next three months, Managing Editor Marian Hookham of Energy Publishing's Australian company said at the Global Steel 2011 conference in New Delhi.

Six million tons of coking coal production has been lost in January alone, Hookham said. "We are looking at a severe situation at the moment."

Supplies of coking coal--which is mixed with iron ore in blast furnaces to produce steel--are highly dependent on coalfields in Queensland. Seven of the biggest coking coal producers--BHP Billiton Ltd. (BHP), Xstrata PLC. (XTA.LN), Rio Tinto PLC (RIO), Anglo American PLC. (AAL.LN), Peabody Energy Corp. (BTU), Wesfarmers Ltd. (WES.AU) and Macarthur Coal Ltd. (MCC.AU)--have declared force majeure on parts of their production in Australia over the past month.

Mines accounting for nearly a quarter of Australia's annual 333.4 million ton coal production have announced production problems due to floods.

Energy Consultant Wood Mackenzie said the affected mines account for 55% of Australia's coal exports, and 80% of the affected stocks is of coking coal.

Arun Kumar Jagataramka, chairman of India's Gujarat NRE Coke Ltd. (512579.BY), which owns two coal mines in Australia, estimated the coking coal production loss at 15 million-20 million tons until now due to the floods.

The full impact of the production loss is unlikely to be felt for some weeks as Asian steel mills have stockpiled large volumes of the material in advance and Australian mines and ports are working through their own stockpiles.

Still, prices have started rising.

"I won't be surprised if hard coking coal prices touch $400 a ton," Jagatramka said, adding that prices have already reached $300 a ton. They were about $200 a ton before the floods.

A Dow Jones Newswires poll of six commodity analysts suggested that quarterly hard coking coal contracts would settle at $308 a ton for deliveries in the second quarter of 2011, while spot coking coal prices are likely to go above $400 a ton.

-By Arpan Mukherjee, Dow Jones Newswires; 91-11-4356-3310; [e-mail]