Restructuring of the Coal Mining Industry and the Challenges of Energy Transition in Poland (1990–2020)

Abstract

The European Union’s climate policy and the energy transition associated with it force individual countries, their economies and their industrial sectors to carry out thorough changes, often of a deep, high-cost and restructuring nature. The aim of the article is to provide a multidimensional assessment of the forms and effects of the restructuring of coal mining companies in Poland in light of the current energy transition process. The research problem is encapsulated within the following two interdependent questions: Has the restructuring process allowed the coal mining industry to achieve sufficient efficiency to sustainably compete in the open market, and to what extent, if at all, have the objectives of restructuring been achieved from the perspective of changes in the energy mix? The research covers all coal mining companies included in the official statistics. It adopts a long-term perspective (1990–2020), dating from the beginning of the systemic transformation in Poland. The research involved the use of multivariate financial analysis methods, including the logit model for predicting the degree of financial threat, as well as taxonomic methods for assessing the dissimilarity of structures and their concentration. The general conclusion of the research is that there has been a lack of consistency (follow-up) between the forms and effects of restructuring in coal mining companies in Poland on the one hand and changes in the composition of the country’s energy mix as a result of the energy transition on the other. In particular, this means that such restructuring, being neither effective nor efficient, has failed to accelerate change in the energy mix.

ESG Assessment from the Perspective of the Management Board and Trade Unions on the Example of the Opole Power Plant

“…In Poland, the mining sector has been successively (though at a moderate pace) restructured for more than 30 years, but these developments have not been effective enough to accelerate changes in the energy mix (the country's declining coal output was supplemented by imports) [103]. The change in the attitude of the authorities was caused by external factors, i.e., pressure from the EU and the war in Ukraine [11].…”

Hydrogen Storage and Combustion for Blackout Protection of Mine Water Pumping Stations

“…In variants 1, 3, and 5, only low-mineralized water pumped from the goaf is to be treated, while in variants 2, 4, and 6, rainwater captured from photovoltaic panels is also to be treated. The designed variants have a similar surplus of generated electricity, so the amount of hydrogen generated by the variants is similar [36,51,52]. Variants 2, 4, and 6 achieved an annual production of 222 Mg of hydrogen, and variants 1, 3, and 5 an annual production equal to 224 Mg of hydrogen.…”

“…The installation will supply the MWTS with an additional volume of water that can be economically treated. Both variants are expected to create about three jobs for the company's relocated employees [51,56]. The obtained financial and environmental parameters of variants 1 and 2 of the pumping station modernization for the conditions of Q1 2024 are included in Table 1.…”

Integrated Evaluation of Financial Risk in Coal Industry Restructuring: A Model of Linear Regression and PCA

“…e author believes that the essential di erence between the two trains lies in the characteristics of the industry in which they operate. For some competitive industries, because the barriers to entry and exit are not high, the competition between enterprises is far greater than monopoly, and the enterprise scale is too large, which will arti cially increase the sunk cost [11][12][13][14].…”