On eBay until the end of the week you can get yourself a "genuine vintage used" miner's donkey jacket emblazoned "British Coal" and "Harworth Colliery", indicating the vintage on this bit of outerwear is more than 20 years old. Currently, and rather sadly for such a piece of industrial memorabilia, the donkey jacket bid price is just £5.50.

Harworth has a particular resonance in the benighted history of British coalmining. The colliery, right on the county border in the heart of the Nottinghamshire/Yorkshire coalfield, was the site of one of the uglier episodes of the 1984 miners' strike when up to 10,000 pickets laid siege, with bricks flying indiscriminately between police and strikers.

It is one of the deepest of the last UK mines, and in its heyday dug the rich, fabled Barnsley Seam, producing coal of such quality that it fired the Flying Scotsman on its record-breaking London-to-Edinburgh journey.

But the reason for the donkey jacket's sudden appearance in an online auction is the news that Harworth, after more than two years of being mothballed - and many had presumed permanent closure - is set to reopen some time in the coming months with the creation in time of up to 400 jobs.

That announcement coincided with the reporting of a quadrupling of the profits of UK Coal (the stock-market listed rump of the privatised British Coal and Harworth's owner) and with the separate news that the biggest flotation on the London Stock Exchange this year, set for next week, is to be a coalminer.

So what has heralded this apparent return of King Coal?

The simple answer comes from 10,000 miles away with the news that the world's largest coalminer - a joint venture between Australia's BHP Billiton and Mitsubishi of Japan - has signed contracts to supply the worldwide steel mills of Britain's richest resident Lakshmi Mittal at a price 211% higher than last year.

Coal, stoked by the demand of hungry economies of China and India, has become an expensive commodity, and suddenly long-forgotten resources are being revalued.

Few took note when the Czech Republic privatised its last state-owned mines - incidentally once owned by the Rothschilds in the 19th century - in the old rust-belt region of Silesia for about €400 million (£314 million) in 2004. Four years later, the business, now renamed New World Resources (NWR), is set to be valued at close to 12 times that figure when it makes its debut in London at the end of next week, the biggest initial public offering of the year here.

"Our mines are in a region like the former powerhouses of Europe like the Ruhr in Germany or around Newcastle," says Mike Salomon, the ex-Billiton man bringing NWR to market. "Except we still have billions of tonnes of coal in the ground, and we are serving the large manufacturing growth in central and Eastern Europe."

So do rising prices herald a renaissance in the British coalmining industry? Despite the dewy-eyed claims of some that we have 1000 years of coal under our feet in Britain, the answer is probably no.

The output of UK Coal goes to the giant ageing power stations of the north Midlands and Yorkshire, which are responsible for up to quarter Britain's generated electricity and many of which are applying to move to so-called clean coal technology, extending their lives beyond 2015 when new pollution laws come in.

This is the good news for UK Coal, which supplies about 15% of these stations' needs; the bad news is that well into the next decade it is stuck on historically priced contracts, leaving it unable to take advantage of the soaring global price.

The City knows this. It sees UK Coal for what it is: a £1 billion property play developing 25,000 homes and 30 million square feet of offices and warehouses on the wastelands of closed coalfields with the coal-producing arm a nil-priced option which may - or may not - pay future dividends.

For even with soaring global prices, the word from UK Coal is not expansion of its portfolio of ultimately high-cost mines. Indeed the reopening of Harworth is tempered by the planned closure next year of nearby Welbeck Colliery.

As one sceptic told the local newspaper, it probably means UK Coal has worked out Welbeck is worth more as a property investment than Harworth.