Thermal coal markets were a prominent beneficiary of Europe's power sector turmoil in 2022, with prices surging more than 250% through mid-March as utilities and trading firms scrambled to replace lost supplies of Russian natural gas with other fuels.
Benchmark European thermal coal prices remained close to historic highs throughout 2022 on sustained higher use across the continent, averaging roughly $285 per tonne for the year, compared with about $115 a tonne in 2021.
That clashes with the more bullish posture of coal markets in top coal consuming region Asia, which has been bracing for sharply higher coal use and purchases in 2023 as dominant coal consumer ChinaThe divergent tones of Europe's and Asia's coal markets are captured by the record-wide price spread between them.
Over the near term, such actions will likely narrow the arbitrage window by applying pressure to Asia's coal prices. European natural gas and coal markets became highly interconnected in 2022 as utilities and trading firms were forced to accommodate sharply lower expected supplies of pipelined Russian natural gas while competing for sharply higher volumes of thermal coal and other power-generating fuels.Both commodities scaled record price highs during the month following Russia's incursion into Ukraine, while gas prices pushed to further new heights in August as a heatwave cranked up air conditioner use.
Europe has averted any major cold snaps so far this winter, which has led to a historic swell in natural gas stockpiles that will struggle to accommodate any additional inflows.Yet gas inventories remain vulnerable to steep drawdowns should a late winter cold spell kick in just as use from industry starts to recover from the belt-tightening retrenchments seen across Europe in 2022.
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