Romania, ready to deliver coal to Serbia worth EUR 100 M

Oltenia Energy Complex (CEO), the largest coal-based energy producer in Romania, will deliver up to two million tonnes of coal to Serbian power plants and will participate in an international tender to be held this week.
“They (Serbs – ed. note) were looking us, they came to us for discussion. We can provide any quantity of coal they need, we produce between 25 and 30 million tonnes annually, according to demand. Two million tonnes is not a problem for us,” Daniel Antonie, director of the CEO Division of Mining said, quoted by economica.net.
On the local market, the tonne of coal is sold at an average price of about EUR 50. At this price, any contract with Serbian partners would amount to EUR 100 million. However, it’s assumed to such a quantity CEO would provide a substantially discount up by 50 percent. Even so, the potential agreement would rise to EUR 50 million.
“If we win the contract, it’s Serbs’s job to transport the coal. I don’t see how they could transport more than 10,000 tonnes per day, by barge” Antonie explains . At two million tonnes, the entire contract would take 200 days or about seven months.
Serbia urgently needs coal and electricity because of the spring floods whici have seriously affected its energy system. Many of hydropower plants were damaged and the thermal power plants couldn’t compensate the scarcity of capacity because mine galleries were flooded too. For this reason, Serbia is a constant buyer of Romanian electricity and now wants coal.
In mid-September, after an official meeting to Bucharest, Serbian Minister of Energy and Mining Aleksandar Antic told Energy Minister Razvan Nicolescu assured that the Romanian government would provide all the support and approval of permits if Serbia came to need additional quantities of electric power and coal.