Will the real “black gold” please stand up?

Peabody Energy Corp. CEO Gregory Boyce told an audience at the Cambridge Energy Research Associates conference in Houston that the world’s coal markets are becoming more interconnected as energy demand soars and countries look for alternatives to costlier petroleum.

Boyce was Thursday’s lunch keynote speaker at the CERAWeek conference, one of the world’s biggest and most important energy industry confabs. The dinner speaker is none other than former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Boyce’s speech, summarized here, couldn’t have been better timed. Coal prices have been on the rise in recent weeks because of snowstorms in China that have curtailed exports from that country, flooding in Australia and power shortages in South Africa.

In fact, Citigroup Inc. analysts mused on these trends in a research report earlier this month, in which they made reference to coal as the new “black gold.”

No word yet on the reaction in Houston, which for decades has had something of a bias toward that ‘other’ black gold.