Poland is considering to stop coal production at several of its mines until at least 2018 in an effort to help prices by reducing a global oversupply, while trying to keep state operations afloat and avoid job cuts.

The conservative Law and Justice party (PiS), which won parliamentary elections in October, would consider merging the country’s top power firms — PGE, Tauron, Enea and Energa :

“We want to identify the most promising mines,” said Grzegorz Tobiszowski, responsible for coal issues. Then added : “Personally I think Poland needs one big power company. This is why we consider to scale some mines down to keep them ready to re-start when prices rebound.”

Poland’s troubled coal mining sector became a focal point ahead of the recent parliamentary election, as the outgoing government failed to rescue the troubled Kompania Weglowa (KW), the EU’s biggest coal miner.

Poland produces 72.5 million tonnes annually and experts say that taking around 6 million tonnes of excess would help boost prices, the amount Tobiszowski said would need to be reduced.

About 90% of the country’s energy is generated from coal, an industry with a strong local union, which can partly explain why Warsaw has long opposed the EU drive to curb carbon emissions.

Due to technological underdevelopment, the productivity of Polish mines is very low, with 648 tonnes of coal produced per worker per year while in the worst US mines it is more then 2,000 tonnes.

Despite that, Polish producers continue to invest billions in modernizing their coal-fired plants or in building new, more efficient ones. At least four new coal-fired power plants are expected to come on line by 2019.