The Tenas Project's output is metallurgical coal, sold to steelmakers. This is what that market actually looks like as hydrogen-reduced iron begins commercial shipment.
Coal is genuinely coupled to primary steelmaking today. In a blast furnace, coke is both the fuel and the reductant that pulls oxygen out of iron ore. That is the physical fact the industry points at when it justifies new metallurgical-coal mines.
Figures: IEA Iron and Steel Technology Roadmap.
The proponents of new coking-coal mines — including Telkwa Mining Limited on the Tenas Project — argue that metallurgical coal is materially different from thermal coal burned for power. Steel, the argument goes, is essential to modern life (buildings, wind turbines, hospitals, railways) and cannot be made without coking coal, so blocking a new coking-coal mine only shifts the same demand to another jurisdiction, most likely with weaker environmental standards.
The framing has real teeth in the short term. It is also the industry's core answer to climate-based opposition: the coal we mine, the argument runs, is inherently different from the coal you should be worried about.
Around 70 % of the world's crude steel is produced through the blast furnace – basic oxygen furnace (BF–BOF) route. Every tonne of steel through that route consumes roughly 0.6 tonnes of metallurgical coke, plus injection coal — in total on the order of 700 kg of coal per tonne of primary steel.
The remaining ~30 % comes from electric arc furnaces (EAF), which melt scrap and (increasingly) direct-reduced iron using electricity. In the United States, EAF is already about 70 % of production; in China, still under 15 %. Scrap availability, iron-ore reserves, and grid carbon intensity dictate the mix regionally.
The direct-reduced iron (DRI) itself has historically been produced with natural gas as the reductant (mostly in the Middle East and North Africa). What is new in the last decade is DRI using hydrogen as the reductant, producing water instead of CO⊂2 — the technology that turns "green steel" from a slide-deck term into an actual shipping product.
Coal-free primary steelmaking is not a future paper study. It is being built, and in some cases already ships steel to named customers:
These are not fringe projects. They are the plans of the top-five European steelmakers and the world's third-largest producer, backed by the EU Green Deal Industrial Plan, the US Inflation Reduction Act, and Sweden's grid buildout. The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, phasing in through 2026, prices imported blast-furnace steel's embedded carbon at the EU border — steadily changing the competitiveness of coal-based steel exports into the EU market.
The Tenas Project is proposed to produce approximately 825,000 tonnes per year of metallurgical (coking) coal over a mine life on the order of 25 years, with target markets in Asian steelmaking. The operator, Telkwa Mining Limited, is associated with Bathurst Resources (New Zealand), per branding on the proponent's own recent public material.
Bathurst is a mid-size coal miner best known for coking coal in New Zealand and Australia. Its business case for Tenas rests on Asian mills continuing to buy imported coking coal through the 2030s and 2040s. That case runs against the direction of published policy and named commercial deployments in that same window — and, per IEA analysis, against the sector's own available carbon budget:
If operated until the end of their typical lifetime under current conditions, these and other assets in the steel industry could lead to around 65 Gt CO⊂2 of cumulative emissions. This would exhaust most of the CO⊂2 budget compatible with a sustainable transition for the sector. — IEA, Iron and Steel Technology Roadmap
The question the record forces is not whether steel can be made without coal — that's now a matter of shipped product — but how many decades of Asian blast-furnace demand a greenfield Canadian coking-coal mine, permitted in the late 2020s, is actually being planned against.
Rank and formation. Petrographic analysis across the 1989, 2018 and 2019 drill programs places the Tenas coal at medium-to-high volatile bituminous A, with maximum vitrinite reflectance between 0.89 and 1.29 (averaging 0.96). The four seams of economic interest sit in the Seam 1 sequence of Unit 1, deposited in a nearshore-marine, tidal-flat, coastal-swamp environment that later saw restricted marine incursions — the proponent's stated geological explanation for the elevated sulfur content between seams (Section 1.8.2.4, EAC Application Overview, Part A, May 2022).
The regulator's direct challenge. The Working Group Issues Tracking Table (rounds of December 2022 and April 2024) records this exchange:
The coal deposit contains 2% sulphur and 20% ash. Both of these appear to be double the specification for metallurgical coal. Please explain how the project meets the definition of a metallurgical coal mine. — Working Group Issues Tracking Table, Item S1 / Coal quality
The proponent's response. Telkwa Mining answered that the 2 % sulphur / 20 % ash values are pre-processing (in-situ) figures from Table 1.8-4 of the EAC Application, and that after washing at the on-site Coal Handling and Preparation Plant, “post-processed coal quality produces an average ash of <10.0% on an air-dried basis.” The response speaks to ash but, as recorded in the tracker excerpt, does not report a post-wash sulfur figure — a fact worth noting because organic sulfur (a substantial portion of Tenas coal sulfur, per the depositional history above) cannot be reduced by density-based washing.
Processing. The Coal Handling and Preparation Plant is designed for 145 t/h of run-of-mine coal producing 110 t/h of clean coal, via a two- or three-stage circuit (heavy-media cyclones for coarse ROM, reflux classifier for middlings, froth flotation for fines). Total washed product over the mine life: ~16.5 Mt (2022 update; the 2018 Project Description gave 15.0 Mt).
Product mix and its labelling. The proponent's submissions target the product as blending coal for coke production and as a “heating agent” in blast-furnace steelmaking. A public submission to the EAC by the Northwest Institute observes that the project defines “seaborne metallurgical coal” as encompassing hard coking coal (HCC), semi-soft coking coal (SSCC), and PCI (pulverised coal injection) coal — a spectrum that includes grades used as combustion fuel inside the blast furnace rather than as chemical reductant. The metallurgical/thermal boundary is softer in market practice than in the framing of “coal for steel.”
Direct GHG. Telkwa Mining's atmospheric-environment volume estimates project GHG emissions of 68,973 t CO2e/year at Year 5 of operations — the largest sources being fuel combustion in mobile mine equipment and fugitive coalbed methane releases, using an ECCC-standard emission factor of 0.86 kg CH4 per tonne of coal mined for surface bituminous coal in BC. A separate public submission by Mark Chernaik, applying methane-resource assumptions specific to the Telkwa coalfield (Ryan 1993), calculated coalbed methane emissions of 92,546 t CO2e/year — bringing total direct project emissions to about 139,000 t CO2e/year in that alternate calculation. Both figures exclude the downstream emissions from combusting the coal itself.
The 1985 Bustard aquatic-environment assessment for the earlier Telkwa Coal Project already flagged “the potential for acid mine drainage and associated heavy metal mobilization in surface water” — a hazard track that reappears in the current EAC file in Appendix 17 (Metal Leaching / Acid Rock Drainage Management Plan, SRK) and in the multiple sulfide-classification protocols now applied to the pit and waste-rock piles.
| Global sector CO2 | ~2.6 Gt / year |
|---|---|
| Sector share of energy-system emissions | ~7 % |
| Coal share of sector energy demand | ~75 % |
| Coking coal per tonne of BF–BOF steel | ~0.7 t (coke + injection coal) |
| Share of steel via blast furnace – oxygen furnace | ~70 % globally |
| Share via electric arc furnace | ~30 % globally (~70 % in the US) |
| Hydrogen-DRI share by 2050, IEA Sustainable Development Scenario | ~15 % of primary steel |
| Cumulative CO2 if existing sector assets run to end-of-life | ~65 Gt |
| Tenas Project proposed annual output (coking coal) | ~825,000 t / year |
| Tenas Project mine life | ~25 years including reclamation |
| Tenas insitu (pre-wash) sulphur | ~2 % (adb) |
| Tenas insitu (pre-wash) ash | ~20 % (adb) |
| Tenas post-wash ash target | <10 % (adb) |
| Tenas post-wash sulphur, in the EAC record excerpt reviewed | not reported |
| Tenas coal rank | medium-to-high volatile bituminous A |
| Vitrinite reflectance (max, mean) | 0.96 (range 0.89–1.29) |
| CBM emission factor (ECCC BC surface bituminous) | 0.86 kg CH4 / t coal mined |
| Direct project GHG at Year 5 (proponent estimate) | ~69 kt CO2e / year |
| Direct project GHG with Chernaik CBM re-estimate | ~139 kt CO2e / year |
Coal is used to generate heat and to make coke, which is instrumental in the chemical reactions necessary to produce steel from iron ore. — IEA, Iron and Steel Technology Roadmap
Hydrogen and CCUS together account for around one-quarter of the cumulative emission reductions. — IEA, Iron and Steel Technology Roadmap, on the sector's Sustainable Development Scenario