Australia's largest commodity export and vital national resource.

Queensland's coal companies will push ahead with a plan to try to buy the railway lines that carry their product to ports despite the Bligh government ruling out such a measure. All 14 of the largest coal companies operating in Queensland met in Brisbane yesterday at a meeting chaired by former NSW premier Nick Greiner and resolved to form a consortium that would make a bid for the railway lines but not the trains and coal carriages that run on them.

BHP Billiton, the world’s largest miner, said on Monday that it had moved a “significant portion” of its coking coal sales for 2010 to “shorter term market based pricing”, breaking away with the tradition of annual contracts and mutually agreed prices. “These settlements reflect the company’s commitment to achieving market clearing prices over time across all its bulk commodities,” the company said in a statement. It said it had reached agreements with customers in Japan, China, India and Europe.