ICN is still awaiting comment and confirmation on various matters from Glencore since this diversified mining/commodities trading house announced it would cut 15 million tonnes of annual coal production in Australia this year (more than 20%).

However, the Australian Financial Review has claimed that Glencore’s coal operations in New South Wales will be the “epicentre of pain”

This was due to Glencore’s take or pay rail/port commitments in Queensland, with ICN also making the point yesterday that Glencore was less financially exposed to these in NSW where Glencore has its own coal-hauling rail division.

The newspaper also made claims about the next moves from Glencore.

“The plan is to extract volume equivalent to the annual output of two decent sized mines by tweaking shifts and parking equipment in open cut operations,” the newspaper claimed.

“A host of mines will move from seven day shifts to five days and there will be another 120 job losses.”

While no source was attributed to these claims, a Glencore spokesman told the ABC that the company would scale back open cut mining, slow production and cutback on staff working hours.

“The cuts will be announced in a fortnight and staff will be consulted about the changes,” ABC reported.