According to Mr Zhou Xi'an director of General Affairs Department of China National Energy Board, China faces an extremely complex environment in economic development in 2010 and that growth of energy demand may tread a typical fast slow path.

Mr Zhou said "Most of the projects stems from the stimulus packages will go into full-scale production in 2010, so there is bound to be fairly large space for energy demand to grow. He predicts that growth coal imports in 2010 will be eased to a degree and is expected to remain at about 5% for the whole year.”

Mr Wu Chenghou, the advisor of China Coal Transportation and Marketing Association expressed his view on importing foreign coal recently. He pointed out that imported coal is only meagre compared with China coal production, thus it could hardly have a big impact on China's coal market.

He added that given the unduly large trade surplus at present, importing coal from abroad, preferably if the tariff remains low, can be effective to ease trade surplus and lead to a balanced trade.

Mr Wu obviously tends to encourage coal imports. In the meantime he pointed out the funds deficiency is the major difficulty now for coal groups to take big actions in this aspect.

He said that "Apart from Shenhua Group, Yanzhou Coal Group and Lu'an Group, etc all the others are still struggling on the verge of red. They have to have strong financial strength if they want to reach out."

(Sourced from MySteel.net)
Visit www.Mysteel.net for real time access to China steel news!