Clean coal can avert an energy crisis

Britain has enough coal reserves to last up to 300 years – so let's expand our mining and stop relying on unstable supplies abroad

Peter Lazenby
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 April 2009 11.30 BST

The debate on the development of "clean" coal technology needs to accept a key point. Britain is already dependent on coal-fired electricity. Use of coal-fired power stations continued despite the devastation of the mining industry after the strike against pit closures of 1984-85, and coal still provides 33% of Britain's electricity.
Britain simply stopped burning British coal and bought coal from overseas. Last year 43m tonnes of coal were imported, mainly from Russia, Poland and Australia.
Yet Britain has enough known coal reserves to meet the nation's needs for 200 to 300 years. Why not mine those reserves – resume and expand major coal mining in Britain, and to hell with reliance on foreign imports?
The need for investment in clean coal technology is paramount, both to end the damage being done by current coal burn and to make expansion of coal use environmentally viable.
First look at the background to Britain's looming energy crisis.For a quarter of a century the National Union of Mineworkers and others hammered home the argument that energy policy (or lack of it) under successive Conservative and Labour governments was driving Britain towards a future dependent on fuel from overseas.
The Thatcher government encouraged the "dash for gas", in which Britain's North Sea gas was burned in enormous quantities to make electricity. Had the gas been saved for domestic and community use – heating homes, hospitals, schools and the like – it would have lasted for centuries.
The result is a Britain dependent on gas supplies that come from, or travel across, some of the most unstable regions in the world.
Britain in the 1980s and 1990s had the most efficient, and safest, deep-mined coal industry in the world. Today it is even more efficient. At Kellingley colliery in Yorkshire, one of the handful of pits still open, 2,000 men used to mine 1m tonnes of coal annually. Today at Kellingley, 500 men produce more than 2m tonnes.
Britain was also making some of the greatest advances in research into clean coal technology. The Tories cost Britain almost two decades of practical research into solving the environmental problems surrounding the burning of coal by closing the coal industry's research centre at Grimethorpe in Yorkshire.
Had that not happened, carbon capture might be at a far more advanced stage of development. But it is not too late. The support of the climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, for a new wave of carbon-capture coal-fired power stations points the way ahead.
Britain should be opening more mines in tandem with rapid and substantial investment in clean coal technology research. About 20 new pits employing collectively 10,000-plus miners could meet current coal needs. More pits could be sunk to increase Britain's independent energy source. Britain could even become an energy exporter.
If the private sector is unwilling or unable to invest, let it be publicly funded. The future of Britain's energy supplies, indeed the country's very survival as an industrial nation, merits that investment.