Why is Poland importing so much coal?

I was just wondering why the country with the largest coal reserves in Europe would be importing so much. I know 93% of Poland's energy is reliant on coal and I know PGE is building a huge new coal plant in Opole but shouldn't the domestic reserves suffice? or at least shouldn't imports be low, not exponentially increasing? Especially with the EU carbon emissions rules working against the Polish coal industry so heavily.. Just find it strange that imports have risen and exports have fallen over the past 30 years..

indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?country=pl&product=coal&graph=imports

indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?country=pl&product=coal&graph=exports

- Germany ??

The way this country is run, we would have been importing sand If we had been Egypt.

imported coal is simply cheaper as it is mined from open-pit mines - what is more Poland has not enough coke-grade coal and we must import it

Did the Dear Leader tell you to say that?

It's pretty obvious why Poland is importing more and more.

A wonderful sign

yeah did some more research and figured it out for the most part.

"Between the 1990s and 2000s, the coal industry underwent major restructuring, which led to the early closure of many coal mines and a sudden decrease in production output. In fact, due to this restructuring process, Poland's coal production has spiralled into a steady decline. More recently, coal imports exceeded exports for the first time in history."

worldcoal.org/resources/ecoal-archive/ecoal-current-issue/coal-profile-poland/

When this industry becomes more privatized as they claim, in addition to the new PGE deal, exports should probably rise in the future

a couple of closed coal mines have been recently or are being reopened

That's also largely due to lack of badly needed investments in 90's and 00's, some coal mines were shyt and really needed to be shut down, others just needed some improvements.

All coal mines are sh*t and should be shut down as long as they produce for power plants only. These are some of the worst polluters on the planet

You can make methanol, ethanol and natural gas from coal. Converting coal to gas takes 50% of the carbon out of the waste stream. It's not in the interest of Poland or the UK for that matter to import coal when they have such large reserves and have to import so much energy. Both countries can reduce their imports of oil by adding methanol/ethanol to the gasoline mix and clean up their emissions to boot.

gasifying coal is not a clean technology, lots of benzene (and similar) emissions into the atmosphere

capture it and recycle. Benzene has industrial applications.

Poland's coal imports increased by 60% last year by importing over 13 millions tons.
There was a drop in extraction of coal in Poland last year by over a million tons.
Does this increase mean that Poland burned 60% more coal then in 2016 ?
If so why such an increase in one year ?