German hard coal and mining equipment suppliers quit operations
Clean Energy Wire
German hard coal companies RAG Sales and RAG Mining Solutions have announced the end of their business activities, after the country phased out the fossil fuel's mining in 2018 and in 2020 decided to exit coal altogether over the coming years. RAG Sales (RAG Verkauf) was for seventy years a marketer of domestic hard coal and once Germany’s largest coal importer. RAG Mining Solutions as of 2009 was tasked with selling the mining equipment no longer needed in the German coal industry to buyers mainly in China, Russia, Poland, Czech Republic, Australia, Ukraine and Turkey, generating more than 75 million euros, said RAG. Both companies were part of the RAG group which belongs to the RAG foundation, tasked with the so-called “eternity tasks” of securing water levels in and around former coal mines as well as cleaning up and securing contaminated sites.
Germany’s last hard coal mine closed in December 2018 for economic reasons. In summer 2020, Germany’s coal power exit plan was adopted, setting an end date for hard coal and lignite use in power generation by 2038. Hard coal capacity reductions will be implemented using auctions and lead to the scheduled shut-down of the Moorburg plant in Hamburg, one the country’s largest and youngest hard coal plants in 2021.
