Trading in the London Stock Exchange, Contango Holdings has revealed plans to export thermal coal underway in 2023.
Contango Wants to export thermal coal from its Zimbabwe mine next year after a number of pleas from its clients in both Europe and Asia.
Mining Weekly reports that the company, Contango said this on Wednesday and that the company wants to export 10 000 tons of coking coal.
As per the report, Zimbabwe’s neighbour, South Africa, noted an eight-fold increase in coal exports to Europe during the first half of 2022, after the European Union banned coal imports from Russia as part of sanctions for its invasion of Ukraine.
“Fuelled by the dramatic rise in thermal coal prices over the past 12 months … the board is now considering a coking and thermal operation, delivering 10 000 tonnes of coking coal and 10 000 tonnes of thermal coal per month based on current capacity in H1 2023,” Contango said in a statement.
With coal prices started to rise even before the conflict between Ukraine and Russia as some European countries moved away from expensive natural gas to coal, despite global commitments to move away from the polluting mineral.
Contango currently owns 70% of the Lubu project in western Zimbabwe’s coal-rich Hwange district.
Additionally, Contango’s main focus is supplying its low-sulphur coking coal to the southern African ferro alloy and industrial markets, but it has found current prices of thermal coal – used in electricity generation – attractive.
The report further states that the coal mining company announced it had received “unsolicited approaches” for thermal coal from buyers, ranging from trading houses to industrial consumers, in Africa, Europe, and Asia.
Contango, which plans to increase its annual output to 300 000 tonnes by the end of 2023 and also said it had recently raised £7.5-million through a private placement to fund its operations.
Remaining with mining news, BusinessTech Africa reported that an Indian steelmaker Jindal Steel & Power Ltd has secured a deal with Botswana as it will build a 300 megawatt (MW) Coal power plant.
BusinessTech Africa has discovered that the Southern African nation, Botswana, has selected Jindal Steel & Power as its preferred bidder for the project.
An official notice from the energy ministry in Botswana has since confirmed the development as this will become the first fossil-fuel-based power plant the country has procured for the next two decades.
