The famous rugby league team's red and blue jersey will be temporarily discarded for a bright orange "hi-vis" outfit, as the club from Australia's coal capital shows solidarity with the mine workers at the heart of its constituency.

Coal money has always been influential at the Knights, where the list of major sponsors over the years has included Rio Tinto subsidiary Coal and Allied, Nathan Tinkler's Hunter Ports, mining equipment retailer Westrac and the New South Wales Minerals Council.

But the cellar-dwelling league team aren't the only ones sporting a new look; a flurry of transactions over the past year has left the Australian coal industry fragmented.

The large, well-known multinational miners are leaving town, selling their marginal Australian coal mines for peppercorn prices.

In their place has emerged a crop of small, entrepreneurial firms willing to lay bets that they can turn a profit with assets that have been rendered loss-making by the severe slump in coal prices.

The new breed lack public profile and some have no discernable pedigree in mining, leaving some to wonder whether the great turnover of the coal sector has left Australia's mineral resources in good hands.

Established players leave

It speaks volumes about the challenges facing the coal industry when most of the established players seek to exit while the value of their assets are depressed.

Prices for thermal and coking coal have been falling for five years, and by the end of 2015 about 65 per cent of the world's coal mines were loss-making.

With debt challenges and climate-conscious shareholders pushing them to reduce their fossil fuel exposure, the big corporate miners decided to bite the bullet; Anglo American, Rio Tinto, Peabody Energy and Brazilian miner Vale moved to liquidate their Australian coal portfolios.

Seven coal mines have been sold across New South Wales and Queensland within the past nine months, with this week's sale of Anglo's Foxleigh mine to Taurus Funds Management the latest and arguably the most curious.

But Sydney-based Taurus, better known as a lender to high-risk miners unable raise funds elsewhere, has not been the only buyer from left-field.

The Salim Group, an Indonesian conglomerate that controls the world's biggest noodle manufacturer, agreed to buy Rio Tinto's Mt Pleasant deposit under the moniker "Mach Energy" in January.

Clean coal aspirant Exergen agreed to buy Peabody's Wilkie Creek mine for song, while a consortium calling themselves "Batchfire Resources" registered a company in July 2015 and by January had agreed to buy Anglo American's Callide mine in Queensland.

While all seven mines were sold cheaply, ASX micro-cap Stanmore Coal got the deal of a lifetime late last year when it bought Vale's Isaac Plains mine for the princely sum of $1.

"It just goes to show that as hard as you might think it is to sell a coal mine right now, you can still sell a coal mine. There are buyers out there for coal irrespective of how bad you think the sentiment may be," says Shaw and Partners analyst Peter O'Connor.

Many of the transactions have been typified by a lack of transparency; two of the transactions were agreed for undisclosed sums, Taurus refused to name its partners in the Foxleigh purchase, while Batchfire has declined to speak publicly about its plans.

"When things start selling for undisclosed sums you know they are not fetching much," quips one industry insider.

The exception to the trend was Rio's Bengalla mine, which sold for $865 million in September 2015 to New Hope; an established miner with a billion dollar market capitalisation.

Of the seven mines "sold" over the past nine months, only the Bengalla and Isaac Plains transactions have reached settlement.

The other five are still subject to conditions and funds being raised, and at least one of them (Exergen's purchase of Wilkie Creek) looks increasingly unlikely to reach settlement.

Rehab dodged

But finding the cash is not the only uncertainty attached to the new breed of coal speculators, according to Queensland Senator Larissa Waters.

"Company after company is selling Queensland coal mines to small, relatively unknown players trying to dodge responsibility for funding jobs in rehabilitation," she says.

"The state government may not have collected enough money from Anglo American in an upfront bond to cover rehabilitation (at Foxleigh) if the mine closes and the new owners may not be able to cover the true costs."

While "dodging" mine rehabilitation costs was not the only motivation for the big miners to sell, some mines were put on the market with short mine lives and rehabilitation bills exceeding $40 million.

Queensland's Labor government recently introduced a "chain of responsibility" bill to the state's parliament, in a bid to reduce the risk of taxpayers being left to pay for mine rehabilitation in cases where operators collapse.

The bill could compel related parties to contribute to any rehabilitation shortfall, and while the bill does not imply that previous owners of assets are liable, it is not yet in its final form.

"The trend of proven producers offloading assets of questionable value and those being picked up by companies that are either not proven producers or are much more speculative in nature, is a disturbing trend because the environment and local communities have as much or more to lose," says environmental campaigner Dave Sweeney.

"They're more 'pop-up shop' than Myer, and as a business model that might make sense to those who want to take a flutter, but a coal mine is not Randwick or Flemington racecourse."

Rehab dodged

His company may not be well-known, but Nick Jorss makes clear that Stanmore Coal is not a newcomer to Australian coal.

"We listed in September 2009 and we have been steadily exploring and developing our various coal assets, so we have been at this for quite a while," he says.

Nor, he insists, is Stanmore ever likely to neglect its rehabilitation obligations.

"We are actually increasing the rehabilitation activities, and in terms of our ability to fund that we have given the government more than $20 million in a bank account which they can draw, so there is no chance of the state being left holding onto an unrehabilitated mine," he says.

While Isaac Plains will be Stanmore's first producing mine, Jorss notes his executive team has more than 150 years of combined mining experience.

The same is true for some of the other new names on the coal scene; while Batchfire was unknown when it bought Callide, the same can't be said for its shareholders Edek Choros, Peter Westerhuis and Colin Moffat, all of whom have managed and sold coal mines in the past.

Nathan Tinkler, who bought and sold coal mines until he was a billionaire, was the architect of Australian Pacific Coal's Dartbrook acquisition.

Unlike the big miners, Jorss says Stanmore can make money operating Isaac Plains at the current coking coal price of $US84 per tonne.

The company has changed the mine plan, will use more efficient equipment and will create synergies by effectively merging Isaac Plains with the coal tenement next door.

"We have dropped the cost base by 35 per cent from what the previous cost base was," said Jorss.

"We don't have big corporate overheads and we are nimble enough to keep costs down and respond to opportunities.

"More than half the coal mines developed in Queensland in the past 10 years have been developed by junior companies and then they've typically been bought out by bigger companies," he says, in reference to success stories like MacArthur Coal, Felix Resources and Excel Coal.

Casual labour used

According to mining unions, Stanmore is also using some casual labour to keep costs down at Isaac Plains.

For CFMEU spokesman Steve Smyth, casualisation of the workforce is the biggest concern attached to the new breed of miners.

"The only way they can cut costs in labour is to replace permanent workers who have conditions with casual labour. That way, if it rains or machinery breaks you can send them home," he says.

At Callide, Batchfire will not only inherit an economically marginal mine, but one where the existing contractor has reportedly not paid workers for weeks, and where the enterprise bargaining agreement expired more than a year ago.

But Smyth also acknowledges that jobs could be created by the new breed, three of whom are trying to restart mines that were shuttered under the multinationals.

Two others, Foxleigh and Callide were set to shut if buyers weren't found.

Stanmore expects to pay more than $7 million per year in royalties to governments when Isaac Plains resumes production next month.

For those reasons, former federal resources minister Martin Ferguson said Australians should welcome the new face of Australian coal.

"We need more people who are prepared to invest, innovate and create economic opportunities and jobs for Australians," he says.

Integrated Global Partners consultant Lucas Dow, who was until recently president of BHP's Queensland coking coal mines, believes communities will back the new breed and some of the bets will pay off.

"The local councils and authorities would be looking forward to seeing these assets put back into operation ... these smaller companies will step in and there will be success stories and probably a couple that will struggle, and I wouldn't be surprised to see some further consolidation among them."