Oct. 18--NORFOLK -- Three oceangoing freighters, laden with tens of thousands of tons of coal, have already left. Six more are scheduled to go between now and the end of December.

They're headed for an unusual destination: China, the biggest producer of coal in the world.

Against the backdrop of a busy port where 15 to 20 ships of all sizes may come and go on any given day, it may not seem like a big deal.

But the nine colliers, departing from Pier 6 at Norfolk Southern Corp.'s Lamberts Point Coal Terminal in Norfolk, may be on the leading edge of a projected turnaround in American exports of metallurgical coal, or "met coal," a raw ingredient for making steel.

Home to three major coal terminals, Hampton Roads exports more coal than any other port in the nation.

"Hampton Roads is the Big Daddy," said Jim Thompson, managing editor of Coal & Energy, a Knoxville, Tenn.-based coal market newsletter.

This year, however, has been rough, as the global recession sapped coal demand and prices.

From January through September, coal exports at Norfolk Southern's facility and two other terminals in Newport News were off 28 percent from the same nine months in 2008, dropping to 23.8 million tons from 33 million tons a year earlier, according to T. Parker Host Inc., a Norfolk-based ship agency.

"You could almost draw a straight line from the recession to the export levels," Thompson said. "Coal prices are lower; it's been a lack of demand."

A resurgence in coal exports would shore up hundreds of jobs statewide, in businesses ranging from railroads to port terminals, mines to shipping firms, coal-testing labs to harbor pilots and tugboat captains, said David Host, president and CEO of T. Parker Host.

If you're looking for a sign of a recovering global economy, one could do worse than to track rising met coal volumes -- a sign that steelmakers are getting busy again, Thompson said.

And that's just what analysts at Goldman Sachs pointed to in an Oct. 6 report.

"If there is one bright spot that we could highlight for U.S. coal producers, it is that met coal demand has recovered from its trough as steel production has rebounded from its lows," the Goldman Sachs report said. "Most notably versus prior expectations, we see rising demand for met coal from China, Japan and Korea. With Australia likely to face rail/port/mine constraints, we see increased need for remaining U.S. spare capacity in 2010."

Goldman Sachs projects that U.S. seaborne exports of met coal in 2010 will increase by 68 percent -- to an estimated 42 million metric tons, up from about 25 million metric tons this year.