Falling Coal Price Conducive to Urea Production

By CnAgri2013-07-26 11:17:03 Print It is learned from a recently held national coal economy conference that China’s coal production, sales and consumption were 1.79 billion MT, 1.75 billion MT and 1.93 billion MT respectively in the first half of this year, down 3.7%, down 3.8% but up 1.8% respectively on the year-on-year basis. The nation’s coal stock added up to 298 million MT at the end of June.
 
Coal price index was 161.1 on July 5, down 9.6% from the outset of this year and down 23.5% on the year-on-year basis. 29% of large coal mines were in the red in the first half of this year, whose losses totaled RMB4.66 billion.
 
Though coal demand keeps growing, supply appears abundant because of excessive coal productive capacity, increasing coal imports and the increase of hydropower. The falling coal price helps reduce the cost of urea, likely to stimulate urea producers to run at high capacity and result in a urea surplus.

From “China Fertilizer Market Weekly Report”