Coal for Christmas is traditionally symbol of meanness but for the families of the men and women who work in the Illawarra's coal mines, it's become a welcome sight.

With the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment recommending the approval of the expansion at the Tahmoor mine, 2020 has lined up as a boom year for mine approval.

Each of the region's major miners have had their bids for expansion recommended for approval by DPIE - Peabody's Metropolitan mine, Wollongong Coal's Russell Vale colliery, South32's Dendrobium mine, and now Tahmoor.

Add one more and it's a straight flush.

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Of course Dendrobium and Tahmoor have not been determined yet - that task falls to the Independent Planning Commisison, which has recently held detailed and exhaustive public hearings into Dendrobium, and which will soon set a date to do so for SIMEC's Tahmoor expansion bid.

Yes, rumours of this industry's demise have been greatly exaggerated, as Mark Twain might have said were he about.

The difference is that the Illawarrra coalfields generate resources for steelmaking, and the mines looking shakier - be it from efforts to tackle climate change, or China's supposed embargo on Australian coal - are the brown coal operations which feed power plants.

For environmentalists, of course, these lumps of coal in the stocking have been catastrophic. There was genuine belief that the coal industry is on the way out - sentiment shared by many workers in the coal industry who have looked to retrain after numerous rounds of job cuts - and a sense that this may be reflected in the decisions of the NSW planning authorities.

This is not how it's worked out.

There was significant surprise from the anti-coal campaigners when Russell Vale got the nod, coming as it did after years of poor environmental performance, calamitous financial results, and questionable corporate governance by Wollongong Coal's owners.

Their misery would be tempered by the fact that the Russell Vale bord and pillar mining plans would be less damaging than the Dendrobium longwalls, each 300m across. Dendrobium now looms as the watershed: its environmental impact is likely to be more aggressive than some other operations, but the company says being knocked back would mean the Appin mine would have to close as well.

Will the IPC slip through a Dendrobium decision over the holidays? Either way, 2020 has hardly turned out to be a dark year for Illawarra coal.