RBCT operation paused over Power supply failure, shipping operations, rail activities and Coal exports halted from 31 Jan, 2014.
World’s leading Coal exporting South African terminal, Richards Bay Coal Terminal (RBCT) operation subdued owing to the major break down in 132KV Power supply cables, RBCT’s shipping operations and its Coal export facility disrupted.
Ports Authority said in a notice on Tuesday, “RBCT suspended all its operations including the Export Coal train service due to power failure.”
According to the port authority, failure was caused when uMhlathuze Municipality experienced faults on both cables that supply power to Hydra Substation which in turn supply to RBCT.
[su_quote cite=”Port addressed to media.”]Export Coal service has been suspended, the General Freight Business still continues unhindered[/su_quote]
RBCT, Transnet Freight Rail (TFR), Eskom and the uMhlathuze Municipality, all are putting efforts to resume operations as soonest. However, it was expected that fault will be restored till today (6 Feb’14), but mails & calls were not replied for confirmation on development.
The power outage comes on the back of the Coal value chain achieving record railings of 70.81 MnT in 2013.
The power failure is costly for the owners whose vessels are in port or in queue to load. Waiting ships at ports may cost shipper directly a loss of USD 25,000-30,000 per day and more than 25 ships were in queue to load.
RBCT’s per day Coal exports is worth of about ZAR 200 million per day and power failure loss has accounted about ZAR 1 billion, which is considerably big loss for the country.
As the Coal demand fell over to the Chinese holidays, low demand quelled international prices including South African Coal prices. South African 6,000 NAR Kcal/kg Coal is trading in market around USD 78-80/MT on FOB.
Leave a Reply