China's coal production has maintained a strong momentum since the beginning of 2022, with the domestic output of raw coal from January to April reaching a 10.5 percent year-on-year growth and achieving a double-digit growth for four consecutive months, new official data showed.

Among the 10.5 percent growth, the production from the nation's major coal producing provinces and regions including Northwest China's Shaanxi Province and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, North China's Shanxi Province and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region accounted for 80.9 percent of the total output, according to data from the National Energy Administration on Wednesday.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China's top economic planner, has been strengthening supervision and implementing targeted policies to ensure a stable energy supply and prices.

Officials from the NDRC held a video conference recently with a number of coal enterprises in Shanxi on the back of pricing coal sales prices exceeding a reasonable range, the NDRC said on Wednesday. Involved enterprises have made written commitments on strict implementation of relevant policies and keeping the coal prices within the normal range.

The NDRC will guide the coal prices to ensure they remain in a reasonable range in a bid to stabilize electricity prices and overall energy costs, Meng Wei, a spokesperson from the NDRC said at a press conference on Tuesday, stressing the importance to implement measures such as improving the demand and supply mechanism and enhancing the market expectation management.

Meng also noted that NDRC will closely monitor the price changes and take immediate action in the case of unreasonable price fluctuation and speculations.

The NDRC issued a notice on April 30 to further improve the pricing mechanism for the domestic coal market. The notice clearly determines market behaviors for price gouging, including hoarding, faking or spreading false information for price increase, and other behaviors.

The notice also defines the price gouging as spot price which exceeds 50 percent of the upper limit of the reasonable range standardized by responsible authorities without proper reasons.

Global Times