At last week’s Wyoming Infrastructure Authority spring board meeting, Cloud Peak Energy senior vice-president Jim Orchard told attendees, including regional newspaper the Casper Star-Tribune, the US had stiff competition for Asian customer contracts, namely from Indonesia.

Indonesia has the added benefit of being closer in proximity, which also makes it a less expensive alternative.

“For us, it’s all about terminals and for us it's really a question of where it’s going to be,” he said.

“If it doesn't happen in the United States, it'll happen somewhere else.”

The US coal industry is working to push production tonnage to the export market amid weakened domestic demand and pricing.

Asia, including China and India where coal is very strong, is an attractive target market for US coal but Pacific coal export terminals are a key to making those deals.

The executive told the group Cloud Peak and other coal companies were shipping small amounts of coal from growing Canadian ports, all while many companies continued to press ahead with several port projects in Oregon as well as Washington.

In fact, both Peabody Energy and Arch Coal – two other large players in the PRB – both have their own individual port projects in process in Washington.

Those facilities will open up the export market to of tens of millions of tons annually.

Orchard reportedly reminded the group of a recently published outlook report from energy giant BP reflecting a 58% jump in energy demand in China and Asia from last year through 2035.

He said the same report showed seaborne coal exports would more than double from 500 million to 1.2 billion tons annually during that same timeframe.

“What we really need, from a US perspective, is terminals in the United States,” Orchard said.

He was also cognizant of the opposition toward the Washington and Oregon ports from residents and environmental groups including the Sierra Club and that pushback was getting stronger and more united.

Orchard said it was the transport of the coal, not the mining of it, at the heart of the problem.

“Could we double and triple the amount of coal that is going across Montana into Washington state?” he asked.

“The answer is yes.”