A Cloudy Future For Coal  

The Age reports that while coal miners have a pretty strong grip on local government policy, they are a lot more exposed to international efforts to reduce carbon emissions - Carbon tax clouds coal outlook: ABARE.

Australia's coal export industry can look forward to a bright future but overseas carbon tax schemes may cloud the outlook, a conference has heard. The fast-growing economies of China and India were expected to keep demand high, said Rohan Kendall, commodity analyst with the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE).

But Mr Kendall warned industry figures at a Surat Basin Coal Conference in Brisbane that overseas carbon tax schemes could limit growth in demand. He said Australia had set a starting date of 2010 for an emissions trading scheme and ABARE was waiting for details from the federal Department of Climate Change in a green paper to be released later this year before it made further forecasts for the Australian coal industry.

"What is likely to be of more concern to the Australian coal industry is if one of our major trading partners introduced a carbon tax," he said. "This is because the Australian coal industry is export-focused.