Newcastle port restrictions and rail flooding slow coal

Coal stockpiles at the port of Newcastle have grown by almost a half a million tonnes after wild weather along the east coast over the weekend forced at least four disruptions to the Hunter coal network and affected 15 vessels. Vessel queues off the coast of Newcastle yesterday (Monday, September 11) had blown out to 31, up by eight ships a week earlier, after high seas and strong winds limited ship movements over the weekend. Only 17 vessels entered the port in the week to Monday, down by about eight on normal ship movements. The port now has almost 500,000 tonnes more coal in its stockpiles than it did at the end of August. The two terminals had about 1.17m tonnes of coal between them yesterday, compared with about 612,000 tonnes at the end of August. Minor flooding along the rail network to the port has also affected work on the Sandgate flyover, the Australian Rail Track Corporation’s (ARTC) $67m project to clear a known bottleneck near the port. The Hunter Valley Coal Chain Logistics Team (HVCCLT) &#8211 the consortium of coal miners, rail operators and the Newcastle Port Corporation &#8211 is working to clear the backlog by adjusting scheduled maintenance work along the rail corridor and at the port. HVCCLT general manager Anthony Pitt said the limited ship movements had slowed the whole process. &#8220We’ve kept the rail program running as best we can to the point where port stocks are at a level where we’re reducing assembly rates,&#8221 Mr Pitt said. &#8220We’ve worked with our members to re-align some maintenance work to give us continued access to shiploading so we can get the system running again.&#8221 Mr Pitt expected a drop of &#8220several hundred thousand tonnes&#8221 of coal capacity this month as a result of the weather delays. &#8220We’re already running a fairly big vessel queue this month anyway, so it’s just adding to it,&#8221 he said. &#8220It’s just one of these temporary glitches. &#8220We had one in July last year where we lost a few hundred thousand tonnes of throughput.&#8221 Mr Pitt expected that port stockpiles and the coal queue would return to normal next week, with the Bureau of Meterology forecasting calm conditions and fine weather well into next week.

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