Australian Coal Association

The Australian Coal Association (often abbreviated to ACA) is the major coal industry lobby group in Australia. It represents the interests of the black coal producers of New South Wales and Queensland and consists of a number of relatively small coal mining companies or subsidiaries of larger corporations in those two states.

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The Australian Coal Association has a long history, although it makes none of this history publicly available. It has been involved in scientific research into the production of coal since at least the 1950s and has significantly grown with the development of coal mining in Central Queensland during the Bjelke-Petersen years when it did a number of important scientific research projects, notably dealing with the composition of coal and the presence of water and certain trace elements. It has now been a major political force in Canberra for several decades now even though it does not represent all Australia's coal mining interests (companies mining brown coal in the Latrobe Valley are not part of the organisation).

By the 1990s, the Australian Coal Association was known as a major political donor to both major political parties in Australia, with donations to the Liberals estimated at around $50,000 per year. During the Kyoto Protocol in the late 1990s, the ACA and a number of other groups were responsible for giving Australia what is generally regarded outside the closed circles of Australian politics as an extremely lenient target, and in a 2006 program on Four Corners it was listed as one of the principal groups behind the "greenhouse mafia", essentially a large coalition of lobby groups representing the car, fossil fuel, and light metal industries of Australia.

Although it has been accused by environmental groups in Australia of having played a significant role in Australia possessing the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the world, the ACA in recent years has been one of the leading players in the "clean coal" movement - which aims to reduce the environmental impact of coal.