Coal More Popular than LNG in Japan

The Globe and Mail reported that Japan’s coal use has increased as it “tries to lower the cost of replacing nuclear energy,” with the result being that its 10 main utilities used almost 16 percent more coal in the first 10 months of 2013 than they did in the year-ago period. Further, they increased their imports of the fuel by 11 percent.

As quoted in the market news:

With high energy imports contributing to Japan’s persistent trade gap, including 1.09 trillion yen ($10.72-billion) last month, the cost benefits of coal over LNG are compelling.

The value of LNG imports rose 14.3 per cent to 5.79 trillion yen between January and October, compared with a fall of 0.7 per cent to 961.4 billion yen for coal.

Japanese utilities are pushing hard to cut coal prices further and diversify their sources away from Australia and Indonesia, which together supplied almost 90 per cent of Japan’s coal this year.

Click here to read the full report from The Globe and Mail.