China Spurs Coal-Price Surge

China is doing for coal what it once did for oil: pushing prices to new highs, adding more pressure to the creaking global economy.

China has long been a huge supplier of coal to itself and the rest of the world. But in the first half of last year, it imported more than it exported for the first time, setting off a near-doubling of most coal prices around the world. The capper came in late January when a winter of punishing snowstorms and power shortages led Beijing to suspend coal exports for at least two months.

Just since then, Asian prices have shot up an additional 34%. Last week, coal benchmarks hit all-time highs in the U.S., Europe and Asia. That's adding to orries over global inflation already stoked by rising prices for everything from crude oil to cattle feed. "The velocity of the change has been remarkable," says Thomas Hoffman, senior vice president for external affairs for U.S.-based coal supplier Consol Energy Inc., which he says is considering holding off on some commitments to supply coal to see if prices rise even further.

For the world, which uses coal for about 40% of its electricity, the result is similar to what happened after China became a net importer of oil in 1993. But the Chinese factor is unfolding much faster with coal. It wasn't until China's industrial development shifted into overdrive this decade that the nation began to shake global petroleum markets. Oil's big price surge came after widespread brownouts in China in 2004 forced factories there to buy diesel fuel for backup generators, increasing the country's foreign oil demand.

China's need for coal is rising as other factors around the world are putting severe strain on supply for the fossil fuel. Flooding at major mines in Australia since mid-January has dramatically stunted that major coal producer's exports to Asian markets. For more than a year, meanwhile, Australia's overloaded ports have been choked with cargo vessels, forcing ships to wait in long lines to dock and get their coal. Power shortages and blackouts in South Africa amid rising demand there have curtailed exports to Europe. In Russia, another major coal producer, rail-car shortages have frustrated attempts to meet growing world demand.

Demand is rising quickly elsewhere. Japan, one of the world's biggest importers, is burning even more coal since an earthquake damaged a nuclear reactor last year, doubling one utility's coal intake. Longer-term pressure comes from India, which has mounted a major expansion of coal-fired electricity plants that is driving up the country's coal imports despite its large domestic reserves. Indonesia has been moving over the past year or so to divert more of its coal stores to domestic use, as the coal industry there has been depleting its higher-quality coal reserves.

Even U.S. coal producers are ramping up exports to Europe, as buyers who for years were uninterested in American coal now are scrounging for supply. "There's a butterfly effect," with issues inside China pushing up demand and prices for the fuel from other coal-producing nations, says Vic Svec, a senior executive at Peabody Energy Corp., the world's largest private-sector coal producer, based in St. Louis. "Demand from Beijing can ripple back to Queensland, Australia, or Gillette, Wyoming."

Trucks carry coal toward provinces as China's worst snowstorms in 50 years have both increased demand and hampered delivery.

Creating U.S. Jobs

The China-driven coal boom has pushed up wages and created more jobs for U.S. miners as well as port and rail workers -- a twist on recent trends moving industrial jobs from the U.S. to China. "We've as an industry never seen such a dramatic...upturn in the market that seems to have such extended strength," Bennett Hatfield, chief executive of International Coal Group Inc., another U.S. coal producer, said Thursday in a call with analysts. Consol Energy said exports from its Baltimore terminal rose 20% last year and it expects a 25% jump this year.

Thermal coal prices at Australia's Newcastle port, an Asian price benchmark, finished at $125 a metric ton Monday, according to the globalCOAL international trading platform. That was up 34% since Jan. 25 and up 143% from January 2007.

On Monday, Central Appalachian coal futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange for delivery in March stood at $78.25 per U.S. ton. That's double its price at the start of 2007 despite weak domestic demand and above-average stockpiles due to a mild U.S. winter.

Some experts say coal prices could remain high or even keep climbing through 2009 or beyond, weighing on the already-slowing world economy. Even though coal is a leading source of atmosphere-warming greenhouse gases, its share of the world's energy diet is increasing -- which could help keep its price up in a recession. Although the use of cleaner-burning alternative fuels is on the rise, fast-growing energy consumption is expected to underpin coal demand. Still a relatively cheap -- and abundant -- alternative to oil, coal is sought in rapidly industrializing nations such as Brazil, India and Vietnam as well as China.

The demand for steel in developing countries has put coking coal used for steel at historic highs, as well as the thermal coal used for power. New coal-fired electric plants under construction in the U.S. also should add 50 million tons of new coal demand a year, about a 5% increase above current demand, say natural-resources portfolio managers at U.S. Global Investors.

To be sure, some of the factors boosting coal's price are temporary. China's worst snowstorms in 50 years have both increased demand and hampered delivery from coal mines in northern China to power plants across its southern and western regions. China has been methodically closing down thousands of unsafe and inefficient coal mines, restricting supply until enough new or refurbished mines can be opened. And Chinese regulations have contributed to shortages. China has freed domestic coal prices to rise with demand, but has capped electricity tariffs. That led power plants to order less coal -- leaving them short of coal when the storms hit.

But it's unclear how long Beijing could take to reopen more mines or correct its market imbalances. And other factors driving up prices aren't likely to change soon.

Chinese coal demand grew nearly 9% last year, raising its share to a quarter of the world's consumption. Its coal industry roughly doubled output from 2001 to 2006, but that growth slowed to about 6% last year, not enough to keep pace with demand. Five years ago, China exported 83 million more metric tons of coal than it took in. Last year, that surplus had fallen to two million. The rapid loss of more than 80 million tons in exports amounts to about 12% of the internationally traded market.

This year will be worse, predicts Gerard Burg, minerals and energy economist at National Australia Bank, who calculates China will become a net importer of 15 million tons. The International Energy Agency forecasts the gap will continue to widen: Unless China changes its energy mix, the agency predicts, it will be a net importer of 66 million tons of so-called coal equivalent, an energy measurement that equates to 95 million metric tons.

Supply Worries

Coal was assumed by many in the energy industry to be immune to worries about the stability of supply that have helped push oil to record highs. Coal reserves are more evenly distributed around the world, and most of the world's coal is consumed where it's mined. Coal prices enjoyed a bull run in 2004 and 2005, but today's prices are higher and are causing more concern, as the possibility of a global recession looms and oil trades at around $90 per barrel.

Coal reserves still are relatively plentiful world-wide. But expanding the infrastructure to mine and transport them in developing countries is slow and expensive -- and those countries' consumption is rising at least as fast their output. India ramped up production by a third from the late 1990s to 2005, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, while its consumption increased by roughly 40%. Russia plans to double its coal consumption, says U.S. Global, in part to free up natural gas for lucrative export to Europe.

A cart full of coal to be delivered to a heating station in Miyun, north of Beijing.

As recently as 2003, China was a critical coal supplier to many Asian neighbors such as Japan, which relies on China for 10% of its coal. But around that time, China's economic expansion began to accelerate sharply, especially in heavy industries that guzzle electricity, including auto making, steel and chemicals. Coal exports began to dwindle and imports rose.

Beijing began closing coal mines in 2005 to address a horrific safety record. Energy-security experts still expected its exports to increase. But China also was adding hundreds of new coal-fired power stations -- enough to power all of Australia in 2006 and again in 2007 -- even while closing older, inefficient ones. According to the China Electricity Council, China's power-generating capacity rose by 18% just from last July to December, most of it fueled by coal.

Disruption in China

In northern China's coal belt, there were massive expansions on key rail lines to keep the supply flowing. But by mid-December last year, cracks in the coal-supply chain started to appear as the country entered the winter heating season. On Dec. 11, the huge city of Chongqing announced it would ration electricity for the first time during winter. Government officials said overworked generators were breaking down, and there was a shortage of coal.

By early January, the government said it had closed 10,412 coal mines and still planned to close 1,100 more. Meanwhile, coal miners and buyers were preparing for contract negotiations. Coal prices, freed from government control two years earlier, were steadily rising. But the government was keeping caps on electricity rates to hold down inflation, at an 11-year-high. Power producers started lobbying for higher tariffs. They began shutting down some plants because they were unprofitable to run -- and let their coal stockpiles run down to just 10 days' supply, according to the Ministry of Railways.

On Jan. 10, the worst blizzards in decades started to pummel a huge swath of central and southern China, leading to heating shortages. The vice governor of one of China's most economically important provinces, Guangdong, publicly chastised power operators for chasing excessive profits.

A day later, Xiao Peng, the vice general manager of China Southern Power Grid, said the region had shut down 6% of its power-generating capacity because of a shortage in coal -- the worst electricity shortage in five years. Other provinces reported power plants had stopped providing electricity because they couldn't afford coal supplies, until ordered back online. Later in the month came the ban on coal exports.

The coal shortage has rippled through other commodity markets, hurting China's output of steel, copper, zinc and aluminum as electricity is being diverted for domestic industry and household heat and electricity. China's largest copper producer, Jiangxi Copper Co., shut down some plants, contributing to higher U.S. copper futures. Jim Thompson, editor of Coal & Energy, a daily market newsletter on the coal industry, said if global coal prices remain high, it's possible that utilities in the U.S. and Europe could run low on fuel too.

Write to Shai Oster at shai.oster@wsj.com and Ann Davis at ann.davis@wsj.com