DTEK stops buying ‘expensive coal’ from SA

Ukraine’s biggest energy company, DTEK, said on Friday it will no longer buy coal for the forthcoming heating winter season from South Africa, Russian news agency TASS reported.

It will instead resume deliveries from eastern Ukraine which is controlled by anti-government forces.

“I will be frank; we got our fingers burnt last year when we brought expensive coal from South Africa and had a tariff [from heat plants] that [only] covered 70 percent of our expenses. So, now we have a principally different position that we are not ready to use imported coal,” DTEK’s CEO Maxim Timchenko told journalists on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the Yalta European Strategy in Kiev.

He said the company would instead bring coal from eastern Lugansk and Donbass regions where it has stockpiles of about two million tonnes.

Timchenko said it was a “great progress” that coal supplies from Donbass had been resumed in the past two months. Thus up to 40,000 tonnes of coal are daily delivered to government-controlled part of Ukraine by rail.