Coal: The hottest global commodity

Every once in a while, a fact or an anecdote or a statistic hits you right between the eyes. Sometimes a megatrend is simply too big to see all at once; it’s so all-encompassing that your brain can’t quite take it in. But then suddenly, when the right puzzle piece falls into place, reality blows you away with its magnitude.

This news does that a little bit for me. We’ve all heard about the commodity super cycle. Some of us (like yours truly) have been writing about it — and helping readers profit from it — for years. But still. Coal? We’re running out of coal now?
Oil, fine. Wheat and platinum and uranium and natural gas and water, fine. But, pardon my French, freaking coal? The stuff that runs miles deep in the nooks and crannies of seemingly half the industrialized countries on the planet?

To borrow a quote from Blazing Saddles, What in the wide, wide world of sports is a-goin’ on here?

What’s going here isn’t about exhaustion of supply, of course. It’s about yet another extraction bottleneck. It’s about demand running away with such speed and force that supply just can’t keep pace. As with the world’s diminished oil reserves, it doesn’t matter how much coal is in the ground if we can’t get it out of the ground fast enough.

Commodity Online