In Poland, where coal is king, homeowners queue for days to buy fuel

WARSAW/BOGDANKA, Aug 27 (Reuters) – In Poland’s late summer season warmth, dozens of automobiles and vans line up on the Lubelski Wegiel Bogdanka coal mine, as house owners petrified of winter shortages wait for days and nights to fill up on heating fuel in queues paying homage to communist occasions.

Artur, 57, a pensioner, drove up from Swidnik, some 30 km (18 miles) from the mine in japanese Poland on Tuesday, hoping to buy a number of tonnes of coal for himself and his household.

“Toilets were put up today, but there’s no running water,” he stated, after three nights of sleeping in his small pink hatchback in a crawling queue of vans, tractors towing trailers and personal automobiles.

“This is beyond imagination, people are sleeping in their cars. I remember the communist times but it didn’t cross my mind that we could return to something even worse.”

Artur’s family is one of many 3.8 million in Poland that depend on coal for heating and now face shortages and value hikes, after Poland and the European Union imposed an embargo on Russian coal following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

Poland banned purchases with a direct impact in April, whereas the bloc mandated fading them out by August.

While Poland produces over 50 million tonnes from its personal mines yearly, imported coal, a lot of it from Russia, is a family staple due to aggressive costs and the truth that Russian coal is bought in lumps extra appropriate for dwelling use.

Soaring demand has pressured Bogdanka and different state-controlled mines to ration gross sales or supply the fuel to particular person consumers by way of on-line platforms, in restricted quantities. Artur, who didn’t need to give his full title, stated he had collected paperwork from his prolonged household within the hope of choosing up all their fuel allocations directly.

The mine deliberate to promote fuel for some 250 households on Friday and would proceed gross sales over the weekend to minimize ready occasions, Dorota Choma, a spokeswoman for the Bogdanka mine advised Reuters.

The limits are in place to forestall hoarding and profiteering, and even promoting spots within the queue, Choma stated.

Like all Polish coal mines, Bogdanka usually sells a lot of the coal it produces to energy vegetation. Last 12 months, it bought lower than 1% of its output to particular person purchasers so lacks the logistics to promote fuel immediately to retail consumers.

Lukasz Horbacz, head of the Polish Coal Merchant Chamber of Commerce, stated the decline in Russian imports started in January when Moscow began utilizing rail tracks for navy transport.

“But the main reason for the shortages is the embargo that went into immediate effect. It turned the market upside down,” he advised Reuters.

A spokesman for the Weglokoks, a state-owned coal dealer tasked by the federal government to increase imports from different international locations declined to remark, whereas the local weather ministry was not out there for remark. Government officers have repeatedly stated Poland would have sufficient fuel to meet demand.

In current years, Poland has been essentially the most vocal critic of EU local weather coverage and a staunch defender of coal that generates as a lot as 80% of its electrical energy. But coal output has steadily declined as the price of mining at deeper ranges will increase.

Coal consumption has held principally regular, prompting a gradual rise in imports. In 2021, Poland imported 12 million tonnes of coal, of which 8 million tonnes got here from Russia and utilized by households and small heating vegetation.

In July, Poland ordered two state-controlled corporations to import a number of million tons of the fuel from different sources together with Indonesia, Colombia and Africa, and launched subsidies for homeowners dealing with a doubling or tripling of coal costs from final winter.

“As much as 60% of those that use coal for heating may be affected by energy poverty,” Horbacz stated.

Back at Bogdanka, Piotr Maciejewski, 61, a neighborhood farmer who joined the queue on Tuesday, stated he was ready for a protracted wait.

“My tractor stays in line, I’m going home to get some sleep,” he stated.

Reporting by Marek Strzelecki and Kuba Stezycki, Editing by Ros Russell

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