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12 Mining NZ » Spring 2017
Coal » Industry News
BT Mining new driver for Coast coal
Hugh de Lacy
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We’re really excited to be taking over such a fantastic
asset as Stockton, and also to be able to cement our
place in the domestic thermal coal industry.”
The public perception may be that the New Zealand
coal industry, and especially the bituminous export
sector on the West Coast of the South Island, have
faded into history along with former state-owned
collier and liquidated dominant player Solid Energy
(SE).
Certainly SE has all but disappeared from the
industry to which it briefly gave so much hope and
investment, but a new company, privately owned,
has emerged to take its place not only on the West
Coast but in the sub-bituminous mines of the
Waikato in the North Island.
BT Mining is the new driver of West Coast coal
production and its arrival on the scene has signalled
that the New Zealand coal industry is indeed alive
and, if not altogether well, it’s at least climbing out
of the hole into which it and SE were consigned by
the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis.
BT Mining is an association of recently de-listed
Australian collier Bathurst Resources and the
Nelson-based Talleys food company, with Bathurst
holding 65% and Talleys the rest.
The new company has been part of a
reemerging optimism in the sector on the West
Coast, says E Tu union organiser and national
mining advocate Garth Elliott.
“Coal-mining on the West Coast has certainly
retracted a fair bit,” he told MiningNZ.
“We bounced along the bottom for a while but
things are looking promising.
“BT Mining has been buying a lot of SE assets,
coal prices have come back a little bit, and there’s a
bit of confidence out there actually.”
The underlying cause of the new optimism is
the recovering - though still wildly volatile - price of
high-grade coking coal, a vital ingredient of the steel
industry, of which there is a constant world-wide
shortage. That price has been as low as $US47
a tonne and as high as $US308/t in the past few
years, against a broadly recognised benchmark
average of $US150/t as the level at which New
Zealand coking coal mines are economically viable.
Of course coking coals make up only half of
New Zealand’s total production of about four million
tonnes a year, the rest being thermal coals, mostly
produced in the North Island, which are used by
domestic industries.
The price local businesses pay for thermal coals
sets itself just below the cost of imports, and, like
demand, is low-margin but stable.
It’s the West Coast coking coals, which are
subject to the global spot price driven largely by
Australian producers in cahoots with Japanese
steelmakers, that make the export dollars for New
Zealand, and which have suffered most in the
volatility of the past few years.
That price is currently bouncing around the
$US200/t mark, making it attractive to New Zealand
exporters.