Vessel demand for coal exports rises at Australia’s Newcastle port this week

Forty-three ships are heading to Australia’s Newcastle port this week to load coal exports, up from 38 ships last week, the Port Authority of New South Wales said Wednesday, January 28.

An additional 13 ships were waiting off the Newcastle coast for a berthing slot at 7 am local time Monday (2000 GMT Sunday).

Nine ships were taking on cargo at the port’s three coal terminals at the time, the report said.

The 37 ships that entered Newcastle port last week to load coal cargo waited an average of 4.8 days for berthing slots, down from six days for the week ended January 5, according to port authority data.

The vessel queue for Newcastle port reached a recent high of 61 ships in the week of September 21.

PORT WARATAH QUEUE

The shipping queue for the two Port Waratah Coal Services’ terminals for coal exports at Newcastle port fell to 20 ships, the Hunter Valley Coal Chain Coordinator said Wednesday.

Glencore, Idemitsu Australia Resources and Rio Tinto ship coal exports through the PWCS terminals.

HVCCC, the logistics coordinator for the Hunter Valley coal exports corridor, expects the ship queue to peak at the end of this month.

“Based on terminal demand, the queue at PWCS is estimated to be 26 at the end of January and less than 10 at the end of February,” HVCCC said.

Australian coal producers have told HVCCC they expect export demand for coal cargo at the PWCS terminals to reach 10 million mt in January but fall to 9.1 million mt in February.

Data are unavailable for the number of ships waiting to load cargo at the Newcastle Coal Infrastructure Group terminal for coal exports at Newcastle port.

The terminal is operated by a group of five coal producers led by BHP Billiton that also includes Centennial Coal and Yancoal Australia and has an annual capacity for coal exports of 66 million mt, or around 1.25 million mt/week.

Based on port data Platts calculates, the shipping queue for the NCIG terminal is 23 vessels this week, up from 14 ships sailing to the facility a week ago.

The Port Authority of New South Wales and the private owners of Newcastle port no longer issue weekly updates on the volume of coal exports shipped from the port, Australia’s largest for coal exports.

HVCCC said the two PWCS terminals shipped a total of 2.3 million mt of coal exports in the week to Sunday, up from 1.99 million mt for the week ended January 18.

“January’s month-to-date ship-loading [volume] is currently 8.25 million mt which is 802,000 mt below the declared outbound target,” the report said.

In the week ended Sunday, a total of 3.3 million mt of coal exports was railed to Newcastle ports terminals, both NCIG and PWCS, up slightly from 3.27 million mt a week earlier, HVCCC said.