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Gold/Mining/Energy : Precious and Base Metal Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Taikun who wrote (32760)	11/24/2004 11:30:01 PM
From: Rocket Red	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 39344

Coal boom: Grande Cache Coal shares jump again on news of first exports Gary Norris Canadian Press November 24, 2004 1 \| 2 \| NEXT >> ADVERTISEMENT TORONTO (CP) - At this rate, children will be pleading for lumps of coal in their Christmas stockings. Shares in Grande Cache Coal Corp. jumped 10 per cent Wednesday - quintupling their initial public offering price in May - after the company announced its first export shipment. Stock in the company, which has revived mining for coking coal in the Grande Cache area of west-central Alberta, traded as high as $13.25 and closed at $13.00, up from $11.75 Tuesday, $7.25 at the start of November and $2.60 when the shares (TSX:GCE) were issued just over six months ago. In a blazing global coal market stoked by demand from China and elsewhere in Asia, Grande Cache is not alone in posting outsize stock-market gains reminiscent of the late-'90s technology bubble. Western Canadian Coal Corp. (TSXV:WTN), a new miner of metallurgical coal in northeast British Columbia, topped $5.00 on Wednesday, up from a 52-week low of 46 cents. Northern Energy and Mining Inc. (TSXV:NNE.A) a junior company exploring B.C. coal properties, was at $2.73, up from 74 cents a year ago. On a larger scale, units in the Fording Canadian Coal Trust (TSX:FDG:UN) have almost tripled in the past year to over $90. The zooming stock values reflect "the near-term prospects for coal prices, which are nothing short of pretty spectacular," said Patricia Mohr, commodities specialist at Scotia Economics. "It is a China story," she said, noting that Chinese steel production surged more than 20 per cent in the year through September and China's headlong industrial expansion has pulled in steel from other Asian countries. "Steam coal prices are up as well, but not as dramatically as coking coal" - hard coal that is cooked into coke used in blast furnaces to make iron for steel. "I think probably you're going to get some more expansion in 2005," Mohr added. "Because there hasn't been much investment in coal mines for really quite a long time, the coal market - particularly for hard coking coal - really has tightened a lot." Grande Cache's stock-price boost Wednesday - on top of a 13 per cent gain Tuesday after the company added underground production to the surface mining it began in August - was propelled by an announcement that it has moved 35,000 tonnes of metallurgical coal through Westshore Terminals near Vancouver to JFE Steel in Japan. The coal boom is unlikely to abate soon, said Doug Hurst of D. S. Hurst Inc., a B.C. consultant who two years ago was predicting big gains for western Canadian junior coal companies. "That was all based on China," he said, but "I would guess that there's lots of room for all of these things to run." In addition to Chinese and Japanese steelmakers, "Indian steel producers have been pounding their way through Vancouver looking for sources of metallurgical coal," he said.