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I see the galaxy brain complex at CIW is having another meltdown. First, a few inconvenient facts on coal. China is cutting imports from everyone, not just Australia #coal #auspol #China
Most of these cuts are thermal, not coking coal. Even so, the exploding spread between onshore coking coal and offshore indicates that China is coping with a lack of Aus coking coal very poorly thus far.
The reason for the lack of coping on coking coal? Simple - Australia *is* the market for all intents and purposes. That doesn't mean China can't mine more themselves, or get it from Mongolia.
And they are very much trying to do this from recent news. http://www.sxcoal.com/news/4612375/info/en #mongolia #coal
So what is the takeaway? What is happening to Chinese imports and the coal market has been planned for years - long enough to change its power grid, expand freight rail and become more self sufficient as any Gerschenkon inspired mercantilist would do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Gerschenkron
There's an Australian think tank industrial complex which trades on "knowing China" and "managing relationships" and "being culturally sensitive". That's a great pitch and a lot of people go for it, all I can see is optimizing a transport flow network to get energy to demand.
So, yes there is some material in the works to publish this to close a knowledge gap between people in the market who have to put their money down on outcomes and not just their egregiously bad takes.
In the meantime, I can't stop the China relationship cargo cult collapsing and its high priests being found out. They are welcome to continue losing the plot on twitter though. 
Anyway, thanks to satellite data we can now observe import substitution at the asset level. Here is Guodian Taizhou Power station, and its coal mix by countries. Note that the trend is clearly towards more local coal over time.
