BEIJING—National Power Corp. will need 5 million tons of coal in 2008, up slightly from last year’s 4.7 million tons, and hopes to buy around 10 cargoes of the hydrocarbon from China.

Known as Napocor, the state-owned firm also said yesterday it was replacing two cargoes bought from BHP Billiton in South Africa with cargoes from Indonesia, logistics vice president Juan Carlos Guadarrama told reporters in Beijing.

Those two cargoes — an unusual commitment to ship into Asia from South Africa — were for May or June shipment but could not be performed, the executive said without elaborating.

"Actually, that one did not push through. They (BHP) could not work by our contract terms," Guadarrama said on the sidelines of an industry conference.

"Maybe somebody else might have offered higher prices."

He added that Napocor had negotiated to buy a cargo apiece from Indonesia’s Gudung Bayan and Straits Resources, and that those two shipments were intended partly to offset the loss of its South African cargoes.

Napocor bought about 12 cargoes of Chinese coal — with each cargo typically 65,000 tons — in 2007. —Reuters