In our recently issued market assessment and sizing, we highlighted what we thought might be a short to medium-term increase in demand for CTRM solutions for coal. Our thinking was that coal is still needed in many parts of the world and while it is and has been fossil fuel enemy number 1 in the EU, elsewhere it remains an essential fuel. So, in spite of regulations in Europe and activist investors and financiers, we suspected there may be a spin out of ‘dirty’ coal trading to avoid any issues and hence a little bit of a boom for Coal systems. Well that may well be so but the Russia-Ukraine war has changed everything and especially coal. Europe imports 55% of its coal from Russia and many European countries still rely on coal to a large degree – Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands dependence on Russian coal ranges from 87% in the case of Poland to Spain’s 44% according to the Green Brief. Meanwhile, other European countries like Czechia, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy and Germany have already indicated that they may burn more coal to cut their reliance on Russian gas. Even prior to the war, coal use… continue reading
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