RI coal export prospects still bright

Vincent Lingga, The Jakarta Post, Singapore Fri, 11/05/2010 10:50 AM Business

Indonesia, already the world’s largest exporter of seaborne thermal coal since 2005, will continue to be a major supplier to the Asian market even though the quality of its coal reserves has declined to sub-bituminous and even liqnite or lower-rank coal, Garibaldi Thohir, the chief executive officer of publicly listed PT Adaro Energy, said here Wednesday.

“First of all, the biggest international market for coal now is Asia, notably China and India, which are practically on our doorstep,” said Thohir who was here to receive several awards for Adaro Energy at the 2010 Platts Top 250 Global Energy Company Rankings on Tuesday evening.

The ninth annual Platts 250 Global Energy Company Rankings measures companies’ financial performance using four key metrics: asset worth, revenues, profits, and return on invested capital. And to be ranked, companies must have assets greater than US$3 billion.

Thohir said the high economic growth in China and India, which made these countries hungry for natural-resource commodities, notably energy, had drastically changed the international coal market.

Asia now accounts for more than 65 percent of global coal consumption.

Platts analyst James 0’Connell quoted The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (Abare), a government research agency, as saying recently that India, the fastest growing importer of thermal coal, will import almost 70 million tons this year.

“Indian imports will expand to more than 77 million tons next year as 18.8 GW in additional capacity of power generation is expected to be completed next March,” Abare estimated in a report in June.O’Connell said China, with an annual production already exceeding 3 billion tons, will still import almost 100 million tons this year and 103 million tons next year to fire its huge power generation industry.

Another Indonesian competitive advantage, according to Thohir, is that Indonesia has very low production costs as most of its 95 billion tons of reserves allow for open-cast mining, he added.Yet most important, he added, “our coals produce very low emissions of sulphur, nitrogen oxides and wastes. The benefits of all this for users is that our coal would reduce the costs of their equipment maintenance and ash disposal”.

Indonesian coal exports are estimated by the coal miners association at about 200 million tons this year, much lower than the original projection due to the unusually heavy rainfalls that have affected mining operations.Andre Mamuaya, Adaro Director and Corporate Secretary, said Indonesian domestic coal consumption would also increase steadily as the country is expanding the capacity of its coal-fired power generation to reduce dependence on oil.

“The State Electricity Company [PLN] now uses only about 40 million to 42 million tons of coal per year. But this volume could double within the next five years as several new coal-fired power stations come on stream”, Mamuaya added.The Ministry of Mines and Energy recently revealed the government program to convert diesel-fired power plants with a combined capacity of around 8,000 MW into coal-fired plants.Most of the additional 10,000 MW new capacity being built under the first crash power program which was launched in 2006 is also based on coal.Based on the government’s energy plan, the state electricity company (PLN) will generate more than 50 percent of its output with coal.