THE WEIGHT OF WHAT LIES BENEATH.

There are facts about Queensland that most residents absorb without ever quite registering them as extraordinary. The state’s budget has, in recent years, collected more revenue from a single commodity dug from the earth than most comparable jurisdictions collect from entire industries. The hospitals built, the roads graded through the interior, the schools expanded in coastal suburbs — much of this infrastructure traces its funding, directly or indirectly, to coal. That traceability is not incidental. It is the structural condition under which Queensland has operated for over a century, and its implications for the state’s identity, its politics, and its future are still being worked through.

Coal mining in Queensland began near Ipswich in 1825, making it among the oldest continuous extractive industries on the continent. For most of the nineteenth century it remained modest in ambition and local in market. Prior to the 1880s, coal mining was a relatively small and insignificant industry. Most of the early mines were located at outcrops exposed by weathering and erosion, and after this time, mining focused on the chief producing mines on the Brisbane River at Redbank, Goodna and Ipswich. The Railway Department was a reliable customer, and the industry existed in productive, unspectacular relationship with the rhythms of colonial settlement.

What transformed Queensland from a state with coal into a state defined by coal was not a single discovery but a slow convergence of geological fortune, geopolitical demand, and deliberate state investment — culminating in the mid-twentieth century in a series of decisions that would reshape the entire fiscal architecture of the state. Understanding that transformation is to understand something essential about Queensland: not just what it produces, but what it has been willing to become.

The namespace coal.queensland serves, within the emerging framework of Queensland’s permanent onchain identity layer, as the civic address for this subject — a durable register for an industry whose weight in the state’s public life has never been adequately captured in any single institutional record.

FROM IPSWICH TO THE BASIN: A GEOGRAPHY OF ACCUMULATION.

The story of Queensland coal has two distinct chapters. The first is dominated by the southeast — the Ipswich coalfields, which for generations supplied the domestic market and provided the material conditions for the colony’s earliest industries. The closure of Ipswich’s last coal mine on 17 December 2019, New Hope’s Jeebropilly Mine, signified the end of almost 200 years of mining on the Ipswich coalfield. That nearly two centuries could elapse between a field’s opening and its final closure attests to the staying power of the industry’s earliest geography.

But it is the second chapter — centred on the Bowen Basin of Central Queensland — that elevated the industry to its present scale. The first coal deposit was found accidentally, at Blair Athol homestead in 1864, when a well-borer digging for water struck coal just 20 metres below the surface. Ludwig Leichhardt was the first European to discover coal deposits in the region in 1845. Robert Logan Jack was a Queensland Government geologist who reported coal deposits in the basin in 1878. But formal, large-scale commercial exploitation would wait almost another century.

Large-scale coal exploration began in the Bowen Basin in the 1960s. The catalyst was American. A critical part of the Bowen Basin’s history occurred in the late 1950s when US geologist Richard Ellett was engaged by Utah Construction and Mining company to start mineral exploration for a commodity that could be used for large-scale mining operations, in particular iron ore and coking coal. Anticipating a rapid increase in demand for coal imports from Japan, Utah was granted a prospecting area of about 1,750 square kilometres around Blackwater and by 1967, extensive open-cut mining had commenced at Blackwater, with promising discoveries of future coal seams identified. In 1965, a ten-year deal with Japanese steel industry executives secured the future of Utah’s mining investment and, in agreements signed with the Queensland government, had secured rights to an estimated 2,000 million tonnes of coal over an 84-year period.

This arrangement, extraordinary in its scale and duration, established the template for the decades that followed: Japanese and Korean steelmakers as anchor customers, Queensland as supplier, and the state government as both regulator and financial beneficiary. Coal transferred to the Goonyella railway line, built in 1971 to connect Bowen Basin mines to the coast, and additional mines subsequently sprung up along its course. The infrastructure of export followed the logic of extraction, and the landscape of Central Queensland was permanently reorganised around it.

The area is rife with commercially significant black coal, with about 75 percent of the deposits of Permian age and about half of the coal seams shallow enough for open-cut mining. The Bowen Basin extends about 600 kilometres from the area around the town of Collinsville in the north, through the regions near Moranbah, Dysart, Emerald and Blackwater down to Moura and Theodore at the southern end, traversing nine local government areas. To traverse this territory today is to move through a landscape shaped almost entirely by the economics of a single commodity — the towns, the roads, the maintenance camps, the fly-in fly-out schedules, all organised around the question of what lies below.

THE FISCAL ARCHITECTURE OF A RESOURCE STATE.

To understand what coal has meant to Queensland’s public finances requires moving beyond export statistics and into the logic of the royalty system — the mechanism by which the state converts geological wealth into budget revenue. A coal royalty is a payment made by mining companies to the state government for the right to extract and sell coal resources, which are owned by the public. It represents the community’s share of the value of these natural resources.

This framing — the community’s share — is not merely rhetorical. It reflects a longstanding principle in Queensland’s resource law: that coal in the ground belongs to the Crown, and that private extraction of public resources must yield a dividend to the people of the state. The practical application of that principle has generated enormous variation over time. Coal companies experienced a long period of stability in terms of the royalty regime, without any changes to royalty rates or price tiers in Queensland over almost a decade since October 2012, despite prices rising substantially over that time. This follows a range of changes to the royalty regime prior to that period, with at least six major changes made to coal royalty rates over the previous 20 years.

The most consequential modern adjustment came in July 2022, when the Queensland government introduced new progressive tiers keyed to coal prices. Queensland’s coal royalty regime is a tiered system that applies a different royalty rate depending on the price of coal. The rate starts from 7 per cent — when prices are below $100 per tonne — to a peak of 40 per cent when prices are over $300 per tonne. The timing was deliberate: coal prices had spiked dramatically following geopolitical disruption in Europe and supply-side constraints from the pandemic. The windfall collected in 2022-23 was extraordinary. Queensland collected a record $15.36 billion in coal royalties in 2022-23 following the introduction of higher tiers.

To place that figure in civic context: it represented, in a single financial year, a sum comparable to the entire capital works programs of many other states. It funded hospitals and roads and regional infrastructure that would not otherwise have existed. And it crystallised, with unusual clarity, the central bargain at the heart of Queensland’s fiscal life: the state’s comparative advantage in world coal markets converted directly into public services.

Central Queensland University regional economic development professor John Rolfe said the royalty scheme was “hugely important” to the state’s revenue base, noting that “it makes it hard for the government to adjust the numbers because the fiscal situation is tight, and if they do try and reduce royalties back to a more sensible position, it then puts other parts of the budget into trouble.” This is the dependency that the 2022 windfall exposed: an industry that had long underpinned Queensland’s fiscal capacity had, at peak prices, become so central that adjusting its terms carried direct consequences for schools and hospitals.

WHAT QUEENSLAND ACTUALLY PRODUCES: THE METALLURGICAL DISTINCTION.

Not all coal is equal, and Queensland’s particular advantage in the global market is worth understanding precisely. Most of Australia’s black coal is produced in Queensland, accounting for 57 per cent of national production. But the more important distinction is qualitative. Queensland accounts for around 90 per cent of Australia’s metallurgical coal production. Metallurgical coal — also known as coking coal — is not primarily a fuel. It is an industrial input, the material that enables steel production in blast furnaces, and it commands a significant premium over thermal coal on world markets.

Queensland is the world’s largest seaborne exporter of metallurgical coal, including hard coking, semi-soft coking, and pulverised coal injection coal. Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coking coal, supplying around 50 per cent of the 331 million tonnes produced globally. The practical implication is that Queensland’s coal is not merely energy — it is infrastructure in the most literal sense. Every tonne of hard coking coal exported from Hay Point or Dalrymple Bay represents steel that will become a bridge, a building, a rail line. Queensland’s metallurgical coal is an essential input for approximately 75 per cent of the world’s steel mills.

Queensland is Australia’s largest coal-producing state, with more than 224 million tonnes of coal produced from 59 active mines in the twelve months to May 2025. Of this, approximately 61 per cent was metallurgical coal and 39 per cent thermal coal. Queensland is a global leader in coal exports, supplying almost 200 million tonnes in the 2024 financial year to more than 30 countries, including China, Japan, India, and key European markets.

The export geography itself tells a story. Japan has been the anchor customer since the 1960s, when the agreements that opened the Bowen Basin were negotiated with Japanese steelmakers as the primary counterparties. India has grown substantially as a destination. Following import restrictions by the Chinese government in 2021, coal exports to China ceased, even though China had previously received a major share of Australia’s exports. The main importers of Australia’s metallurgical coal now include India, Japan, the European Union, and Korea. Queensland’s coal industry demonstrated genuine diversification under this pressure — a resilience that speaks to the fundamental quality and competitiveness of the product.

THE COMMUNITIES COAL BUILT.

The fiscal story of Queensland coal cannot be told apart from its social geography. The industry did not merely generate revenue for a distant treasury; it created entire towns, labour markets, and social ecologies in the central Queensland interior that would not otherwise have existed. The Bowen Basin covers an area of over 60,000 square kilometres in Central Queensland running from Collinsville to Theodore, with a workforce of approximately 40,000 people in 2022.

The coal sector directly employed 27,002 Queenslanders and supported 387,285 direct and indirect jobs across the state. These benefits have long provided for Queensland, with the coal sector underpinning the state’s prosperity for decades. Since 2010, the Queensland coal sector has generated $335.8 billion for the Queensland economy, supporting an average of 24,795 jobs per year and spending $285.5 billion with local businesses, community contributions and government payments.

The towns that grew to service the Bowen Basin — Moranbah, Dysart, Blackwater, Clermont — are not incidental settlements but purpose-built communities whose entire civic infrastructure was calibrated to the mine cycle. Schools, hospitals, sporting facilities, council chambers: all of it exists because of coal, and all of it faces uncertain futures as the industry navigates its current pressures. The chief executive of the Greater Whitsunday Alliance noted that while the region’s economy is diversifying, coal remains the most important local industry, with the resources sector directly and indirectly supporting nearly 76,000 jobs — nearly three-quarters of total employment in the region.

This concentration of economic dependency in particular places is one of the defining characteristics of Queensland’s coal geography. It is what makes any discussion of the industry’s future not merely an economic or environmental debate but a profoundly civic one. The question of what happens to Moranbah or Dysart if the industry contracts is inseparable from the question of what kind of state Queensland intends to be.

THE ROYALTY TENSION: STATE REVENUE AND INDUSTRY SUSTAINABILITY.

The tension between the state’s fiscal appetite and the industry’s commercial viability has defined much of the recent debate around Queensland coal. Royalties owed in Queensland have been decreasing since 2022 in line with falling coal prices. The royalty rate in Queensland is a tiered system indexed to coal prices; therefore as coal prices retreat from the highs seen in 2022, so too does the overall royalty rate applied.

Revenue declined to an estimated $5.49 billion in 2024-25 as coal prices moderated, according to Queensland Treasury’s official budget papers. That decline — from $15.36 billion to $5.49 billion in two years — illustrates the volatility that the royalty system imposes on the state budget, and the structural problem of financing recurrent expenditure with commodity-linked revenue. The value of Queensland coal exports fell from AUS$52.3 billion in 2024 to AUS$38.9 billion in 2025, which was the first time since 2021 that the value of coal exports had been less than AUS$40 billion.

Queensland, which is largely responsible for Australia’s standing as the world’s largest exporter of metallurgical coal, hiked coal royalties in mid-2022. The subsequent debate has been vigorous. Major producers have argued that the tiered system is unsustainable at higher price points. In the past decade, BMA’s mining operations have funnelled more than $21 billion to the Queensland government, with more than $1.5 billion of that having been paid in royalties in the 2024-25 financial year alone. Critics of industry’s position have noted that margins remain historically respectable even under the new regime. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis believes royalties are not necessarily “sending coal miners broke” in Queensland, noting that “the margins of major coal companies remain strong by historical coal mining standards.”

The job losses announced in 2025 sharpened the debate considerably. Since the start of the 2025-26 financial year, the coal sector has seen more than 1,000 Queensland jobs lost. Isaac Regional Council Mayor Kelly Vea Vea noted that the combined impact of announcements from Anglo American and BHP affected about 1,020 jobs across the region. These figures are both economically significant and socially weighted in ways that no budget spreadsheet fully captures: behind each number is a household, a mortgage, a child’s school enrolment, a local business that depends on mining wages.

Multiple companies in Australia have criticised Queensland’s 2022 royalty rate change as the reason behind their decisions to lay off workers and as a risk to investment in the industry. However, sustained high operating costs and labour shortages are putting pressure on margins for coal miners across both New South Wales and Queensland, more so than government royalty rate increases. The question of causation — how much is royalty policy, how much is the global price cycle, how much is structural change in steelmaking demand — resists clean answers and will continue to animate the political debate for years.

THE LONG VIEW: COAL IN QUEENSLAND'S CIVIC IDENTITY.

There is a tendency, in discussions of Queensland coal, to frame the industry purely in terms of transition — what it will become, what will replace it, how long the remaining demand will last. That framing, while important, tends to obscure what the industry actually is: one of the foundational structures of a modern state. The relationship between Queensland’s coal wealth and its public institutions is not a recent or contingent one. It is generational.

Coal quite literally built modern Australia — and with more demonstrated black coal resources than any other state, Queensland proved a lynchpin in this emerging energy regime. By the turn of the century, the state was producing over 6 million tonnes a year of coal, and by 1930, it was some 10 million tonnes. The scale of that production growth, achieved over decades without the enormous export infrastructure that would eventually emerge, speaks to the depth of the industry’s integration into the state’s economic and civic fabric.

"Queensland's coal industry continues to enjoy key advantages, including its geographic location and the quality of its coal, compared with most of its global competitors."

This assessment, from Queensland Treasury’s own analysis of long-term global coal demand, captures something that is easy to lose sight of in the current period of price pressure and employment uncertainty. The comparative advantage of Queensland coal — geological quality, port infrastructure, institutional knowledge — is not easily replicated. Whatever the ultimate trajectory of global coal demand, the decades ahead will still be shaped, in significant part, by decisions made in and about Central Queensland.

The energy transition creates genuine uncertainty, particularly for thermal coal. Under the IEA’s Announced Pledges Scenario, Australia’s overall coal production falls by about 25 per cent between 2021 and 2030. Metallurgical coal production remains relatively steady, while thermal coal production falls by about 40 per cent over the same period as demand declines in key importing countries. This divergence between metallurgical and thermal coal futures is central to any serious assessment of Queensland’s position — and it is a distinction the state’s own economic planners have been careful to maintain.

Queensland is home to vast coalfields, with government estimates putting the inventory at around 34 billion tonnes. That resource base is not going anywhere. The question of how and at what pace and under what regulatory conditions it is converted into public revenue is, at its heart, a civic question — one about the relationship between publicly owned natural resources and the communities that live above them.

A PERMANENT ADDRESS FOR AN ENDURING SUBJECT.

Queensland’s coal industry is one of those subjects that resists easy summary precisely because it is so thoroughly embedded in the state’s institutional life. It appears in the budget as a royalty line; it appears in the Bowen Basin as a landscape; it appears in Central Queensland towns as a social contract; it appears in the energy transition debate as a set of difficult questions about pace and justice and economic diversification. Each of these registers is real, and none of them is the whole story.

What the industry has unambiguously been, for two centuries, is a maker of the state’s fiscal capacity. Coal has powered Queensland’s prosperity for over a century. Today, the debate over Queensland coal royalties has become a defining test of how the state manages its transition from an extraction economy to a diversified one. That transition, whatever form it ultimately takes, will be negotiated from a position shaped entirely by what coal has already made possible: the roads, the hospitals, the schools, the regional infrastructure that constitutes the physical expression of Queensland’s public wealth.

Anchoring that history — its origins near Ipswich in the 1820s, its expansion into the Bowen Basin in the 1960s, its fiscal peak in the extraordinary revenues of 2022-23, and its current navigation of global price pressure and energy transition — in a durable public form is the purpose of coal.queensland. The onchain identity layer that this namespace represents is not a commercial proposition but a civic one: a permanent address for a subject whose weight in Queensland’s story will outlast any particular market cycle, any political debate about royalty rates, any individual company’s investment decision. The resource is geological; the record should be permanent.