Page 64 - bne magazine November 2021_20211104 uzbekistan risding

64 I Eurasia bne November 2021
Kazakhstan sits on the world’s eighth largest coal reserves, but China has never before shown much interest.
China looks to Kazakh coal amid
energy crisis
Almaz Kumenov for Eurasianet
China is the world’s biggest
coal consumer. Neighbouring Kazakhstan sits on some of the world’s biggest coal reserves. Yet they have never done much business trading the stuff, largely because it is expensive to move by rail.
That may be about to change.
Rolling blackouts caused by a coal shortage are threatening China’s economy. Gummed-up supply chains, the post-COVID consumption boom and emissions-reduction targets are all to blame. But Beijing also miscalculated last year, imposing an informal ban
on products from Australia, one of its largest coal suppliers, when Canberra called for an independent investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
Coal prices have risen almost fourfold
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over the last 12 months, the Wall Street Journal reported, reaching record highs.
Now China is looking for new sources, willing to brave even the most indirect import channels.
The eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang received its first shipment of Kazakh thermal coal (the kind used in power plants) recently.
The delivery route was anything but optimal. Landlocked Kazakhstan
first sent the coal at least a thousand kilometres in the wrong direction, overland to a Black Sea port in Russia. There a bulk carrier took on 136,000 tonnes for a 30-day, 15,000-kilometre odyssey to Zhejiang, Bloomberg reported.
“China as a whole has been buying more thermal and coking coal from
Kazakhstan since the start of the year, as power cuts have become more frequent and coal supplies dwindle,” the South China Morning Post reported on October 5.
But how much coal China buys from Kazakhstan is something of a mystery. Figures the two sides provide to the UN's international trade statistics database do not match
Whereas Kazakhstan reported shipping 28.5mn kilos of coal to China in
2016, China reported receiving only 10.5mn. In 2019, the last year for which complete data is available, Kazakhstan told the UN that it had sold China 39mn kilos; China said it bought 150mn kilos.
Political scientist and sometime opposition leader Petr Svoik is inclined to believe the higher figures, explaining