* Volumes grow to 5.3 billion tonnes in 2015
* ARA, Newcastle gain while Richard's Bay falls
LONDON, Jan 19 (Reuters) - Coal trading volumes via financial instruments soared 44 percent to 5.3 billion tonnes in 2015, led by growth in the dominant Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp (ARA) region and Australia's Newcastle, research company Prospex said.
The research, based predominantly on exchange data from CME CME.O and ICE ICE.N , estimated CME's share of over-the-counter (OTC) clearing volumes rose 5 percent to 66 percent, while ICE had the remainder.
Coal market activity is mostly OTC trading done directly between two parties and cleared by an exchange.
The report estimated around 84 percent of the total trading activity via financial instruments was in the ARA region.
A surge in options trading helped drive overall trading volumes higher, along with growth in OTC clearing volumes, the report said.
Clearing activity has picked up across financial markets since the 2007-08 financial crisis, as firms have become more risk averse, using exchanges to protect themselves against default by counterparties.
"Credit concerns remained very high after the shocks of the global financial crisis and the European government debt crisis," the report said.
Ben Tait, director at Prospex Research, said the most active banks in coal trading included Goldman Sachs (N:GS), BNP Paribas (PA:BNPP) and Morgan Stanley (N:MS).
Volumes in the ARA region grew by 59 percent compared with the previous year, while Newcastle volumes grew by 64 percent, the report said.
In contrast, volumes in South Africa's Richard's Bay fell 32 percent, after complaints about high bids for unusual tonnages which some traders said was skewing prices higher. Tait said some of the fall in volume from Richard's Bay switched into ARA and Newcastle.
"It's a double whammy, with ARA being used for coal in the Atlantic and Newcastle for coal in the Pacific and Richard's Bay stuck in the middle," said Tait.
Last year, the global thermal coal industry faced the biggest shake up of its pricing benchmarks when Argus and IHS McCloskey, the dominant price providers, made changes to their assessments, after price spikes in the Richard's Bay and Newcastle markets caused concern that prices could be higher than fundamentals justified. report said the main problem was mistrust of the physical market indices, as shown by the fall in volumes on Richard's Bay.