>>20180322Here's the takeaway from my little lesson on the science and today's industry standards for coking coal.
The best met coal companies to invest in use longwalls, which are far less expensive per ton produced than room and pillar methods like in southern West Virginia, and they provide either Low Volatility (very, very rare), Medium Volatility A (still available at the Warrior mines), or High Volatility A (which is the future of met coal production in America for the coming decades, when Medium Volatility stuff is soon depleted from known coal fields).
The "A" in MVA and HVA just means "high energy content." High energy content, or calorific value per unit weight, helps the coking process just the same as high energy density makes coal-fired power plants easier to run. You pay more for high energy coals, but those coal often pay for themselves in ease of use for the coke makers or the electric generators.
The only reason low-energy Powder River Basin subbituminous coals ever became popular in the US is because of the 1990 revision to the Clean Air Act which banned a lot of sulfur emissions. Before 1990, northern Appalachian (mostly Pittsburgh seam) and Illinois Basin bituminous coals were preferred in the USA for generating electricity, precisely because these higher energy coals, though more expensive per ton, are cheaper to run through coal-fired power plants.
But with the 1990 revision to the Clean Air Act, sulfur scrubbers would have had to be installed to keep burning those coals at power facilities, especially to keep burning Illinois Basin coals, which have even higher sulfur than coal from the Pittsburgh seams, and so Powder River Basin subbituminous went from being considered economically worthless to being the biggest coal product in the USA, and Wyoming eclipsed West Virginia as the USA's number one coal producing state.
So the "A" in US-style met coal ranking just means the coal gets an "A grade" for having lots of energy.
