Winter is coming in Poland. And with coal in short supply, Polish homeowners are turning to trash to heat their homes.

A whopping 60% of households don’t have enough coal supplies to make it through the winter, Piotr Siergiej, a spokesperson for the network of environmental activists called Polish Smog Alert, told Bloomberg.

“People are scared and they are collecting anything that can be used for burning,” Siergiej said. That means they’re turning to everything from high-polluting brown coal to wood, peat, oats — and even garbage.

This comes just weeks after Reuters reported a massive line outside the Lubelski Wegiel Bogdanka coal mine, as desperate Poles waited in their cars and trucks to stock up on coal. One resident of the area told Politico he waited in line for a week to secure his supply.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Poland and the European Union placed an embargo on the import of coal from Russia. Although Poland produces coal, the country largely leans on imported coal for much of its household heating. Lukasz Horbacz, head of the Polish Coal Merchant Chamber of Commerce, told Reuters that the embargo “turned the market upside down.”

Despite climate activists’ continued efforts to replace coal in power generation, the black sedimentary rock is still in demand.

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Making a comeback

Poland isn’t the only country that’s using coal.

According to the International Energy Agency, coal consumption is set to increase globally.

“Based on current economic and market trends, global coal consumption is forecast to rise by 0.7% in 2022 to 8 billion tonnes, assuming the Chinese economy recovers as expected in the second half of the year,” the IEA says in a recent report.

“This global total would match the annual record set in 2013, and coal demand is likely to increase further next year to a new all-time high.”

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The IEA notes that as the world economy bounced back from the COVID-19 pandemic, global coal consumption already rebounded by roughly 6% in 2021.

Analysts point out that the supply and demand dynamics for coal could lead to its glorious revival.

“Looking at the year ahead through the northern winter with gas prices in Europe and gas supply availability, countries are turning back to coal,” Shaw and Partners senior analyst Peter O’Connor tells CNBC.

“And supply [of coal] is tight. Why? Because nobody’s building capacity and markets will remain tight given the weather and COVID. So that market will stay higher for longer, probably well into the 2023 calendar year.”

Time to revisit coal stocks again?

To be sure, coal is no longer making headlines in the investing world. In fact, the only coal-focused ETF — the VanEck Vectors Coal ETF (KOL) — ceased trading in December 2020.

But the industry is far from dead.

Alliance Resource Partners (ARLP), a diversified producer and marketer of steam coal to major U.S. utilities and industrial users, recently raised its cash distribution to investors by 25%.

The stock is also up 100% year to date, in stark contrast to the broad market’s double-digit decline.

Another example is Peabody Energy (BTU), a coal producer headquartered in St. Louis. The company’s products are essential for electricity generation and steelmaking. Its shares are up 157% in 2022.

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