No disrepect taken, it's good to have a fact based exchange of ideas as opposed to the one-sided barracking that tends to take over HC threads.
As you would know from your work, the seaborne market in thermal coal is huge at north of 1Btpa, the total thermal coal market (including captive mines) is a multiple of that.
So thermal coal is a deep market, supply wise is plentiful accross a range of basins, the industry is not concentrated, it is relatively easy to bring on (compared to say a new iron ore province) and the logistics are relatively simple.
The analyst consensus prices recognise this, only one has a long-term price north of US$100/t real.
As always best to have comparators to test a view
- copper is arguably different this this in terms of longer term peice support given shallow higher grade copper is largely exhausted, existing large mines are depleting while demand is also growing - iron ore is high for now mainly on the back of Brazilian tailings dam failures but will probably unwind around $70/t(especially with Simandou finally looking likely). How many people think thermal coal margins are likely to better iron ore margins? - lithium is hard to pick as demand is better than supply in the short term but there are a lot of potential lithium resources
WHC Price at posting:
$4.65 Sentiment: None Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)