Due to the floods in Queensland which caused a prolonged impact on Australia's coking coal industry, Australian Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics (BREE) has recently lowered the domestic coking coal output estimates for 2012, while increasing the iron ore output estimates.
As the bureau predicted, the coking coal output in 2012 would be 161 million mt, 6 percent lower than the previous estimations made in June. In addition, it also reduced its coking coal exports estimates for 2012 by 5 percent to 156 million mt.
In the meantime, however, the bureau has increased its estimates of iron ore output in 2012 by 0.7 percent compared to the previous prediction made in June, to 470 million mt