Never been there, will get there....ghosts or not.
Spoken like many who have no idea about coals and how they're used.
Coal from the Stockton Mine is largely a coking coal. It's used as an ingredient for the manufacture of steel -- a reductant that removes oxygen from iron ore and adds carbon. Coking coals are not used for their energy value. It is extremely difficult to manufacture steel without coal.
Other coals from Stockton are used as ingredients in a variety of other products, such as cement ("clinker' is derived from coal), silicone, activated carbon for coal and water filters and also carbon for carbon fibre. There are few coals sources in the world for carbon fibre. Stockton is one of those.
Even in such high-end niche uses, coal is still a commodity. It is a low-margin business, not helped when it has to be railed too far to a capacity-constrained port and shipped in too small quantities to international clients.
Even as an energy source, coal labours under poor public perceptions, but is neither expensive nor polluting when used in modern technologies.
"Standing on your mother's corpse you told me that you'd wait forever." [Bryan Adams: Summer of 69]
We don't make shit in NZ, we import low cost cheap rubbish with a 100% markup and export commodities for 50% of their value without seeing it anywhere near our books. Best light, sweet crude in the world for diesel fuel off the coast of Taranaki. We sold the rights to it for $150million and it goes in a big tanker and buggers off to be refined.
Why would we do things differently to keep coasters off the dole? (j/k)
If a man is alone in the woods and there isn't a woke Hollywood around to call him racist, is he still white?
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