European coal imports eye multi-year lows in July – Kpler
European coal imports will likely fall this month to multi-year lows, provisional vessel-tracking data from Kpler showed on Wednesday, as muted demand and some disruptions to supply impacted inbound shipments, according to Montel.
Coal deliveries to seven key European destinations – including the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, the UK and Germany – were provisionally pegged at just 3.3m tonnes in July – the lowest level since the firm began collating the data in January 2017 – the data showed.
This would be down from 4m tonnes in June and 5m tonnes in July last year, according to the estimates.
“We continue to see the same trend of seasonally soft demand for seaborne thermal coal in northwest Europe,” Alexis Ellender, lead major dry bulk analyst at Kpler, told Montel.
But he noted some supply-side developments had also contributed to the decline in imports.
“Colombian shipments were disrupted by protests on the rail line linking the Cerrejon mine to the port,” he said, noting the country’s coal exports this month were therefore seen falling my more than 1m tonnes on the year to 4.42m tonnes.
“Meanwhile, US Gulf thermal exports were slowed by hurricane-related disruptions and robust metallurgical coal shipments,” he added, with metallurgical – or coking – coal used largely in steelmaking, as opposed to thermal coal, which is used primarily for power generation.
According to the data, the US would be the biggest coal supplier to Europe this month, shipping 1.32m tonnes, followed by the Australia – which provides mainly coking coal – with 1.31m tonnes and Colombia with 0.3m tonnes.
On the import side, the Netherlands – where giant import terminals at Rotterdam and Amsterdam handle coal for onward shipment via rail and river to Germany and other inland countries – would remain the largest destination for coal imports, with imports totalling 1.9m tonnes, although this was still 10% lower on the year.
Italy came next, with an estimated 0.32m tonnes, followed by Germany with 0.25m tonnes.
As such, coal stocks at Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp (ARA) import terminals this month fell to more than two-year lows of below 4.5m tonnes, with stocks this week only slightly higher at 4.7m tonnes, according to Montel calculations.
In light of the weak demand, Europe’s coal benchmark, the API 2 front month, had averaged USD 108/t in July, compared with USD 111/t in June, according to Ice Futures data.
