If we don’t buy Asia's cheap steel, why would they buy our crap coal?
Market prospects for Northback’s second-rate Grassy Mountain metallurgical coal took another swift kick to the ball bearings, this time from Canada itself.
To promote domestic use of coal-free Canadian steel, the federal government announced drastic cuts in the quantity of cheap Asian steel that will be allowed into the country. Those Asian sources are precisely the markets Northback says will buy coal from Grassy Mountain. Yeah, right.
Given Canada’s elbows-up check on steel from those very countries, how likely are they to buy crap coal from Canada? Grassy Mountain failed last time around because Japanese mills choked on its poor coking properties. Even Northback’s swagman CEO Mike Young concedes Grassy Mountain’s coal is second rate.
Concurrently, Canada is subsidizing the conversion of Canadian few remaining blast furnaces to clean technologies using electricity or hydrogen instead of coal.
The idea that we should “let the market decide” and see who was telling the truth ignores the reality that by the time the market exposes a bad project, the damage is already done—especially with something like selenium contamination, where once pollution occurs there is no effective remedy at watershed scale. The assumption that no one will open a bad mine is naïve: junior promoters routinely advance marginal deposits because short-term speculation, capital raises, and early-stage financial extraction can be profitable even if the mine itself is never viable. In those cases, the public—not the promoters—bears the long-term environmental and financial liabilities. That’s why pointing out that the coal is poor quality is not “protesting too much” but responsible risk assessment. A watershed should not be put at risk to float a speculative gamble at penny-stock scale, particularly when the low-grade nature of the deposit is already well documented from its history as an abandoned, uneconomic working.
Well if the coal is as bad as you say, what are you worried about?
Without contracts, the mine won't start.
Yet you continue to post and postulate and huff and puff. Why?
By continuing your opposition, you are either lying to yourself, or lying to us.