For many reasons coal has got a bad name. You might even say coal’s name has been blackened (ho ho).

However, just because the stuff has got a reputation for being the problem child of Australian resources, and the fuel most hated by environmentalists, it is not sufficient reason for the campaign against coal to be exaggerated by normally well-balanced sections of the media.

What particularly annoyed The Hog this week was a headline on the front page of The Australian newspaper: “LNG tipped to lift as coal volume slides”

Talk about guilt by association, or by extrapolation of the facts, because when you dig into the source of that statement you discover something quite interesting; coal volumes are forecast to rise, not fall, as are coal prices.

What’s happened is that coal has failed to live up to a set of over-optimistic predictions made some time ago by analysts at the Australian government’s Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics.

There is no point in going back to the old forecasts, just as there is no point trying to conjure up old images once seen in a crystal ball. However, it was the decline in old BREE forecasts relative to new BREE forecasts that caused The Australian newspaper to say coal volumes were sliding.

What might have been better, given the pasting coal has taken at the hands of politicians and assorted anti-coal crusaders, would have been a headline along the lines of: “coal volume and value tipped to rise” – or something equally provocative, more accurate, and certainly less politically correct.

The truth about Australian commodities, as seen through the eyes of the BREE team, is that the country has 13 major resource exports, ranging from iron ore at the top of the totem pole to manganese at the bottom.

Of that list, five are expected to enjoy rising export volumes in this financial year, five should decline, and two remain at the same level.

How interesting, how very, very, interesting to discover that two of the five expected to rise are coal (thermal and metallurgical).

It is a similar story on the value measure, with eight of the 13 commodities forecast to enjoy rising value in the current years, and five falling. Two of the rising positions are taken by coal.

The sick men of resources, contrary to what coal’s enemies would care to admit, are oil, nickel, and aluminium – down by value and volume. Copper and lead are forecast to be down by volumes. Gold should be flat by volume and down by value. LNG, the golden child of today’s energy world, will be flat by volume, but up by value.

So, is coal really in such dire straits, or is it simply failing to deliver on forecasts made in the boom years and now adjusting, like everyone else in resources?

The answer, obviously, is adjusting, though the decline relative to boom-time forecasts has emboldened some people to write coal off as yesterday’s commodity with no future.

BREE, whether willingly or not, has provided delicious ammunition to support the argument that coal is an integral part of the Australian economy, and will remain so for some time.

Take thermal coal first. In 2012 thermal coal exports soared by 16% to 171 million tonnes. This year they will rise by a forecast 8%.

If The Hog was in a negative mood he could write a headline saying: “coal growth crashes by 50%”, and he would be perfectly accurate in doing that.

Or, how about a positive heading: “Coal defies the critics as exports rise by 8%”

See the point. If coal had not been blackened it would be seen in the same light as all other commodities, going through a tight patch in terms of price as the world adjusts to a period of over-production of just about every commodity you could name.

It is the same with metallurgical coal. Exports this year are likely to be up by 9%, while over the next five years they are expected to grow by 4.5% a year.

Changes are occurring in Australian coal, but its death is not imminent. Quite the opposite, as the latest BREE analysis shows with one of the big transformation adjustments being a step up to bigger projects as the industry seeks the economies of scale which are available in all bulk commodities.

New mines, while struggling against the headwinds of tight finance and low world prices, will be far bigger than anything developed in the past with three monsters planned for Queensland’s Galilee Basin (Carmichael, China First and Alpha). This is the sort of development that will maintain Australia’s position as a highly cost-efficient provider of coal for decades to come.