The transportation cost from coal-producing Inner Mongolia to the coal consumers of South China's Guangdong Province is 200 yuan per ton, a saleswoman at a Tianjin-based coal distributor, surnamed Sun, told the Global Times Tuesday.
The average price of coal originating in Indonesia and Australia is about $76 to $80 per ton, less expensive than domestic coal, and can be transported to any major port of China, Jin Zhe'nan, sales manager of Sealand Resource Energy Co, a Zhejiang-based distributor of imported coal, told the Global Times Tuesday.
Currently the coal price has plummeted back to where it was three years ago, Jin said, and remains low even though market demand has improved since August.
"Coal prices will tend to be stable in the future and may even inch up along with China's economic recovery," said Liu of Anbound, attributing the drop to shrinking demand for coal both at home and abroad, but remarking that China remains the world's major coal consumer.
Coal power accounts for about 70 percent of China's energy structure, and the country will heavily rely on coal for at least five more years though the government vowed to increase usage of renewable energy such as solar and wind power in its 12th five-year plan, he said.
The volume of imported coal in the first 10 months has exceeded the 168 million tons of net import the country had in the full year of 2011. The world's largest coal producer and consumer, China overtook Japan to become the world's largest importer of coal in 2011.
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