One of the most important business areas of the company is the management of working capital. Energy companies that produce electricity and heat are the main consumers of steam coal, so their decision concerning stock levels is a major determinant of supply schedules. These decisions depend on legal and technical requirements as well as economic aspects. The seasonality of coal consumption jointly with pre-purchase costs and storage costs has a straight impact on delivery scheduling in a parabolic way. There is a divergence in expectations regarding delivery schedules among the coal market participants (energy, mining, transport companies). The purpose of this article is to present the concept of pricing of steam coal and transport service on the Polish market, assuming the use of price incentives, resulting in delivery scheduling during the year. The article presents selected theoretical content in the field of coal logistics and working capital management in the company, the expectations of the steam coal market participant regarding delivery schedules have been identified. The proposed concept of pricing steam coal and transport service should be discussed further in scientific and expert work.

The problem of research undertaken in the article concerns the adaptation of traditional models of calculating the cost of capital to the specifics of mining companies. Solutions known from the literature do not give reasonable results. This is due to the uniqueness of the activities of mining companies, in which case we are dealing with a lack of reference to the typical market situations. The aim of this article is to identify solutions that allow rational and reliable results to be obtained. One of the proposals is a modified Fama-French method. The article was tested by calculating the cost of capital in the largest Polish mining enterprises. The problem of calculation of the cost of capital is particularly important in the area of assessing the effectiveness of investment projects. The cost of capital is used as the discount rate in dynamic measures of performance, such as NPV.