A Coal Miner's Dream

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Luxury cars are no longer the popular topic of conversation. They now talk about their collection of private jets. Over tens of billion rupiah for weekly trips are not out of the ordinary. Money is no longer a problem for people in the coal business. To some of them, such amounts of money can be lost in a night at the baccarat tables at Marina Beach in Singapore, Genting Highlands in Malaysia, or in Macau.

Profits in the coal business have been amazing. Many of the players in this business have become wealthy overnight, or have seen their wealth multiply. Even the small-time players are like local kings. The major business players who control this expansive business rank among Indonesia's wealthiest. They are all quite influential on the political stage, whether openly or behind the scenes.

In this edition, we present portraits of some of these "coal kings." Their profiles are not limited to their jet-set lifestyles. They include the struggles from bottom up in building their businesses and the various disputes they have had to face. It also covers how they deal with the fall of the price of this fossil fuel as a result of the crisis and the abundance of natural gas.

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Among businesspeople involved in coal mining, the Indonesian words for coal are often turned into an acronym to mean 'an evenly distributed commodity from Heaven.' These black rocks of carbon fuel are abundant in many areas of Indonesia, such as in South Sumatra, nearly all of Kalimantan, and even found in some areas of Papua. Sometimes it is found under hundreds of meters of rock. In other places it is just 1 or 2 meters under the surface of the

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