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Coal crunch hits Asia as prices surge

AFP, Sydney
Floods in Australia, freezing weather in China and transport bottlenecks in Indonesia have helped stoke a sharp rise in the price of coal, putting pressure on Asian consumer industries.
Soaring demand from China and India as their economies steam ahead has also combined to push the cost of the fuel to record highs, analysts say.
Australia's Newcastle coal, the regional benchmark, rose to more than 90 US dollars a tonne in January from 75 dollars in October according to the globalCOAL trading platform, an increase of 20 percent in four months.
But even as Japanese steelmakers and South Korean power companies feel the squeeze, producers are struggling to capital ise fully on the price surge.
Australian coal miner Coal Allied Industries Ltd said Tuesday its 2007 bottomline was almost halved to 97.16 million US dollars amid infrastructure constraints and flooding in the key Hunter Valley mining region.
Australia is the world's biggest exporter of sea-borne coal but producers will miss out on billions of dollars in revenue in the next 10 years due to inadequate
rail and port infrastructure, analysts say.
Ships are queuing for weeks to load coal at ports in Queensland and New South Wales due to limited capacity and restrictions on the amount of coal that producers are allowed to transport to port by rail.
"This is just huge and unprecedented demand," said Bede Boyle, a member of the AustCoal Consulting Alliance and a director of Synergy Management Consulting Group.
"Nobody anticipated it, no-one sawit coming," hetold/\FP.
"The driver for all tins is China. We're getting huge demand from Japan, Taiwan and Korea but it
seems to be on the back of the Chinese growth.
"The other thing that has come into the equation, which has hit Indonesia in a big way, is demand for thermal power in India driven by imported coal."
Indonesian Mining Association executive director Priyo Pribadi told AFP the world's largest exporter of thermal coal was bene-fitting from high coal prices but transport shortfalls were putting a brake on growth.
"The supply problem is because of a lack of transportation. From the mining side, we don't have any problems. It's only from the port side -- going to the market - that's the real problem." he said.