Beware of coal overcapacity crisis!

The focus of this issue today's think tank learned at the recent national coal trade fair that in order to do a good job in railway transportation connection of medium and long-term coal contracts in 2020, the National Railway Group will give priority to allocating transportation capacity to enterprises with high medium and long-term contract fulfillment rate. In the first 11 months of this year, the implementation rate of medium and long-term contracts has reached 97.6%. There is no doubt that under the guidance of this market mechanism, the market share of Changxie coal will continue to expand, and it will form an overwhelming situation for the market coal. If Changxie coal realizes "all inclusive", then where will the power coal market go? There is no doubt that the signing of medium and long-term coal contracts in recent years has effectively guaranteed the national energy security supply system and met the development needs of the national economy. However, we should also see that deliberately increasing the institutionalized guidance behind the supply of Changxie coal is making the coal industry lose its original "marketization" attribute.

Today's think tank thinks that the internal regulation mechanism of the coal industry market is completely ignored, and the practice of blindly increasing the supply of long-term cooperative coal is likely to lead to the failure of supply side reform and the crisis of coal overcapacity again! The reason for this is not alarmist! From the analysis of the operation of the power coal market in the past two years, the price focus of power coal is moving down year by year, reflecting the supply On the demand side, the continuous easing of coal supply leads to the continuous decline of annual coal price. So why does the supply and demand situation of coal market continue to be relaxed in recent years? Today's think tank believes that on the one hand, the regulatory authorities are constantly increasing the release of advanced coal production capacity; on the other hand, the failure of the market's internal regulatory mechanism leads to the distortion of the market supply and demand relationship. The continuous operation of high inventory of power coal transfer ports and downstream terminal power plants in recent two years is not the best evidence. The reason is to increase the supply of long-term cooperative coal in large coal enterprises in an institutionalized way, to reduce the living space of market coal and the traction of long-term cooperative price, and to force state-owned coal enterprises to adopt the strategy of "replacing shipment with quantity", so as to occupy the market demand and living space.

It can be seen from the above that coal enterprises do not arrange production according to the real changes of supply and demand in the market, but determine production according to the performance of long-term cooperative shipping contract. Moreover, affected by this, imported coal to a large extent replaces market coal to regulate the relationship between supply and demand in the market, which leads to the inherent insufficiency of the domestic market's self-regulation mechanism, further aggravating the domestic coal supply surplus! If the market goes down and the demand shrinks, the coal enterprises will not deliberately reduce production in order to maintain their survival, but the "quantity guarantee" action will continue, which will lead to the market going out At present, there is a vicious circle of "increase in coal supply - decline in market demand - fall in coal price", and coal production is bound to be in a crisis of excess. In view of the operation of the coal market, today's think tank believes that two issues should be considered in the final analysis at the national regulatory level: first, what are the internal forces of the two? Second, how can the market coal and imported coal achieve dynamic balance and complementarity? Today's think tank also hopes to have extensive discussions with colleagues in the industry to help the healthy development of the coal market Exhibition.