Special Delivery (2009)

This smells suspicious to me. Cash vs. physical settlement is part of the contract specification ... it's not a flag on an order you send to the exchange.

For anyone who wants to do some detective work and track down whether this really happened: there's only two places I'm aware of which trade physically-settled coal futures, NYMEX (QL) and ASX (YCX/YCY/YCZ). I'm 90% sure this post is talking about the NYMEX one --- the author mentioned some XML hiccups, and NYMEX moved to XML for settlement messages back in 2003, whereas ASX still uses some custom message format.