Coal barons

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Coal barons is a term colloquially used to describe individuals with substantial investments in coal mines and related projects.

Modern coal barons

Some contemporary 'coal barons' are:

• Gautam Adani is the chairman of the Adani Group, a major Indian-headquartered company. In March, 2011 Forbes magazine ranked Adani as the 6th richest person in India and the 81st in its list of billionaires based on his estimated personal wealth of US $10 billion. Adani Power Limited is the power business arm of Adani Group, with head office at Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The company is India's 3rd largest private power producer with capacity of 1980 megawatts (MW) and is heavily involved in building new coal-fired power stations.

• Rinat Akhmetov is ranked by Forbes as having a personal fortune of $5.2 billion made from his Ukrainian steel and coal interests. One of Akhmetov's companies is the steel and mining company Metinvest. In April 2009 Metinvest bought the United Coal Company, which was ranked at the time as the sixth largest coking coal company in the US. Another of Akhmetov's companies is DTEK, which has interests in coal-fired power stations in the Ukraine and coal mines. In 2010 DTEK produced over 19 million tonnes of coal representing just over one quarter of all the coal produced in the Ukraine.

• Kiki Barki is estimated by Forbes to be worth over $1.7 billion as a result of the October 2010 public float of his Indonesian coal mining company, Harum Energy. Barki retains a majority stake in the company. Forbes ranks him as the 11th richest person in Indonesia. Harum Energy is the fifth largest shareholder, with a 4.7% stake, in the Australian coal company, Cockatoo Coal.

• Warren Buffett is the Chief Executive Officer of the US-headquartered company, Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett's holdings include the $44 billion purchase of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway in 2009, which is a major coal hauler, and 90 percent of MidAmerican Energy, a utility that operates 11 coal-fired power plants, four of them in Wyoming.

• Chris Cline is the majority owner of the private firm Foresight Reserves, LP, which owns or controls more than three billion tons of coal reserves in the Illinois and Northern Appalachian coal basins in the United States..

• Oleg Deripaska is a Russian billionaire with extensive investments through his holding company En+. One the the subsidiaries of the company is En+ Coal, which "owns a controlling stake in coal producer Erchim-Than LLC based in Yakutia, and manages Tuva Mining Company in the Republic of Tuva." Deripaska is the President and a director of the company while the Chairman of the Board of En+ is coal baron, Nathaniel Rothschild.

• Yao Junliang is the billionaire owner of Meijin Energy, the largest private coke producer in China.

• Guo Jinshu

• David Koch

• Christian Leone

• Hans Mende is the billionaire founder of the AMCI Group, a US-headquartered company which invests in minerals and energy projects including coal projects in Australia.

• Lakshmi Mital

• Clive Palmer

• Matt Ridley

• Gina Rinehart is the Chairman of Hancock Prospecting Pty Ltd (HPPL) an Australian company. Through its Hancock Coal subsidiary, Hancock Prospecting is currently seeking to sell or develop the Alpha Coal Project, and, through Hancock Galilee, the proposed Kevin's Corner Project in Queensland, Australia. The combined output of the two projects would be 60 million tonnes a year.

• Nathaniel Rothschild founded the UK-headquartered investment company Vallar, which has merged Indonesian coal producer PT Bumi Resources and PT Berau Coal Energy to form Bumi plc, a London stock exchange listed company. Rothschild said the $3 billion takeover will make Vallar the biggest exporter of coal to China.

• Wilbur Ross

• Nathan Tinkler

• John Turnbull