For those of us who remember the miners’ strike in the 1980s it takes some getting used to the journey made by coal miners over the past 40 years: from working class heroes to climate ‘criminals’. To hear today’s reaction to the news that Michael Gove has granted permission to build Britain’s first deep coal mine for a generation is to step through the looking glass into a bizarre world where a Conservative government is considered evil for helping to create mining jobs in a de-industrialised region – and the ‘enlightened’ position is to eradicate the very last traces of the coal industry.
Lord Deben, chair of the government’s Climate Change Committee, thinks Gove’s decision to be ‘indefensible’. COP president Alok Sharma thinks it will damage the UK’s reputation. Former Lib Dem leader Tim Farron likens the mine to Betamax (the long-redundant video format) and thinks it will become a ‘stranded asset’. If so, what’s he worried about? It won’t be his or the taxpayers’ problem, only that of the private company which is going to be doing the digging.
None of the Cumbrian coal will find its way into power stations
‘Stranded assets’ have been a talking point in the fossil fuel industry for years. But one of the best investments you could have made over the past year is Thungela Resources – a company created from a demerger of Anglo American’s coal operations last year – whose share price has soared more than sixfold as demand for coal has sharply increased in reaction to the energy crisis.
Coal is, of course, a filthy fuel, which is why Margaret Thatcher’s government was right to promote using cleaner, natural gas as the mainstay of the UK’s electricity industry. But none of the Cumbrian coal will find its way into power stations. It will exclusively be producing coking coal for the steel industry – a detail which for months critics of the project didn’t like to acknowledge. Much as we might wish otherwise, it is not yet possible to produce steel commercially without using coal, or another fossil fuel, as a reducing agent. Those who have argued that we don’t need coal because we can use electric arc furnaces don’t understand steel-making: an electric arc furnace will help you turn pig iron or scrap steel into new steel; it will not help you with the first stage of the steel-making process, which involves removing oxygen from the iron oxides in iron ore to leave raw, or ‘pig’, iron behind.
In future, commercial steel plants might be able to use hydrogen as a reducing agent. There are two demonstration projects – one in Sweden, one in Spain – working on this at present. We don’t know how these will turn out, but under present technology, according to an analysis by Columbia University, it looks as if it will be twice as expensive to produce ‘green’ steel from hydrogen as it is to produce steel from coking coal. To decarbonise steel-making, the production of the hydrogen, too, will have to be zero-carbon – a very expensive and energy-intensive business.
In the short- to medium-term, the alternative to using Cumbrian coal to power steel-making plants in Britain and the rest of Europe is to import coking coal, possibly from Russia as we have been doing for years, or to close down our steel industry for good and import the metal from elsewhere (with no net benefit to the planet because we would effectively be offshoring our carbon emissions). We certainly can’t do without steel – not without all the wind turbines and solar farms the government wants to build.
Sadly, opponents of the Cumbrian mine can’t seem to see this. In the minds of Deben, Sharma and others, only one thing seems to matter: lowering Britain’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. All other considerations, such as jobs and national prosperity, seem to go out of the window.