Two months after heavy rainfall hit the Bowen Basin coalfield and left many coal mines flooded, the Dalrymple Bay coal chain continues to experience problems in sourcing enough coal to export from its 22 coal mines operated by eight coal producers to keep the system running at its potential capacity of 85 million mt/year.
"At the moment, the coal chain is seriously affected by the fact that producers aren't producing sufficient coal for it to rail at full capacity," said Dunning in a telephone interview.
Anglo American, BHP Billiton, Macarthur Coal and Rio Tinto are among the eight coal producers that use the Dalrymple Bay coal chain to transport their coal exports to Dalrymple Bay coal terminal.
Dunning estimated that the Dalrymple Bay coal chain was operating at an annualized capacity of 75 million mt/year.
"Capacity is in the mid-70s million mt per annum," he said.
Coal train operators such as QR National and Pacific National and other users of the coal chain have brought forward planned maintenance to the coal chain's infrastructure while its capacity was being underutilized.
"Service providers are taking advantage of spare capacity. More maintenance is taking place than normal," said Dunning.
As to when production in the Bowen Basin coalfield was likely to return to pre-flood levels, Dunning said it was very difficult to forecast this, and suggested the region's coal industry would need at least a few more weeks for production to begin to recover.
"At least to the end of March, it could be longer, some miners are more seriously affected than others," he said.
Dalrymple Bay coal terminal's vessel queue has continued to ease since peaking at 45 ships in late December as the flooding started to affect coal production in central Queensland.
Dalrymple Bay Coal Terminal had 20 vessels offshore and waiting to load coal exports at 12:00 am Australian Eastern Standard Time March 1 (1400 GMT), according to the coal chain's website.
Coal stocks available for loading at the terminal were 540,700 mt at that time.
"We are still plagued by the same problems in terms of cargo availability. There is not enough cargo coming out of the mines to supply the railway and port," said Dalrymple Bay coal terminal general manager for operations, Greg Smith in an interview.
The coal terminal was presently ordering up 11-12 train loads of coal exports from mines per day, which was significantly below its usual number of 15 coal trains per day, he said.
The terminal was still finalizing its figures for its coal exports for February. However, on a provisional basis Dalrymple Bay coal terminal exported 2.8 million mt of coal in February, still significantly below its capacity of 7 million mt/month, said Smith.
QR National, the operator of the Goonyella rail system which is used to rail coal exports to Dalrymple Bay coal terminal, said in its half-year results statement February 28 that flooding in Queensland could cut its coal haulage volumes by 25 million mt in the year to June 30 2011.
It estimated that 7 million mt of coal exports had already been lost in the six-month period to December 2010, and another 18 million mt of coal exports stood to be lost in the January-June 2011 half-year period.
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