Perth (Platts)--18Dec2012/516 am EST/1016 GMT

Coal shipments from Australia's Newcastle port jumped 19% week on week to 3.26 million mt in the seven days to 7 am Sydney time Monday (2000 GMT Sunday), Newcastle Port Corporation said in its latest coal exports report Tuesday.

Newcastle's coal exporters including Anglo American, Rio Tinto and Yancoal Australia tend to maximize shipments in the last few weeks of the calendar year in a bid to utilize any remaining contracted annual port capacity, traders said.

Forty ships entered Newcastle port to load coal exports in the seven-day period ended Monday, the highest number this year and up from 30 vessel arrivals in the week ended December 10, NPC said in the report on its website.

However, fewer ships were steaming towards Newcastle port to collect coal cargoes than in mid-December a year ago.

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A total of 48 ships had a seven-day arrival notification Monday, compared with 91 on December 19 last year, according to NPC data.

Port Waratah Coal Services, operator of two of Newcastle's three export terminals for coal, exceeded its target for coal shipments last week by almost 200,000 mt after falling short of its target by 275,000 mt the previous week.

Coal exports shipped from the PWCS terminals totaled 2.46 million mt last week, the Hunter Valley Coal Chain Coordinator said in an operating report released Sunday.

"PWCS shiploading for the week was 194,000 mt above the PWCS declared outbound throughput. PWCS port stocks have decreased to 1.43 million mt [from 1.6 million mt at the start of the week]," HVCCC said in its report.

Newcastle's third coal terminal, the 53 million mt/year capacity Newcastle Coal Infrastructure Group facility, accounted for the balance 800,000 mt of coal exports from Newcastle last week, according to Platts calculations.

Cargo railings through the Hunter Valley coal chain were 75,000 mt above their weekly target of 2.76 million mt last week, the HVCCC report said.

This is despite the continuing outage of coal train services for mines in the Gunnedah Basin in central New South Wales state following a train derailment in the area three weeks ago.

The vessel queue for the two PWCS coal terminals has stabilized at about 25 ships, and HVCCC forecasts ship queue numbers will hold steady at this level for the remainder of December.

"The vessel queue is estimated to be 26 [ships] at the end of December based on [cargo] nominations of 10.4 million mt and forecast shiploading of 10.2 million mt," HVCCC added in its report.

--Mike Cooper, michael_cooper@platts.com
--Edited by Wendy Wells, wendy_wells@platts.com

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