Britain’s long transition from coal holds lessons for China

Consumption to disappear over next decade

LONDON, 20, (RTRS): Britain’s last deep coal mine closed on Friday, bringing the curtain down on an industry that once employed more than 1 million miners at over 3,000 collieries.

Coal helped Britain become the first modern industrial power, fuelling her factories, steel works, ships and railways in the 19th century, when the country became famous as the workshop of the world (“Energy transitions”, Smil, 2010).

Contemporary observers believed Britain’s imperial might was bound up with the future of her mines, and their inevitable depletion worried them as much for its political as its business implications.

“Coal is almost the sole necessary basis of our material power (and) gives efficiency to our moral and intellectual capabilities,” British economist William Stanley Jevons warned.

“England’s manufacturing and commercial greatness ... is at stake in this question, nor can we be sure that material decay may not involve us in moral and intellectual retrogression.” Jevons wrote starkly.

For Jevons and many of his contemporaries, abundant, cheap and high-quality coal was what made Britain more powerful than her rivals in continental Europe and the United States.

But the 20th century has seen a steadily move away from coal. Britain’s pits could not compete with lower cost rivals overseas and coal has been gradually replaced by gas, oil, nuclear and now wind in the energy mix.

Domestic production peaked at 292 million tonnes in 1913 but in the years after the Second World War it had had fallen to around 220-230 million tonnes.

On the eve of the year-long miners’ strike in 1984/85 output had dropped to less than 130 million tonnes, and by last year, production had shrivelled to just 12 million tonnes.

The number of deep mines fell from more than 3,000 in 1913 and 1,500 in 1947 to just 170 before the miners’ strike and now zero. Fewer than 25 open cast sites remained open at the end of 2014.

Coal consumption peaked in 1956 at 221 million tonnes, and then declined steadily to just 120 million tonnes on the eve of the miners’ strike.

Consumption was just 49 million tonnes in 2014, three quarters of it burned in power stations. Most of the remaining consumption will disappear over the next decade as coal-fired power plants are phased out.

In the last decade, coal has been demonised as the dirtiest and most polluting fossil fuel. Eliminating coal as an energy source is the top objective for climate campaigners and public health professionals.

Coal combustion has been identified as one of the biggest contributors to climate change because it releases more carbon dioxide than oil or natural gas into the atmosphere.

Coal burning is also a significant source of toxic substances such as mercury as well as tiny airborne particles all of which can cause cancer and other diseases and a significant increase in mortality.

Coal has been blamed for regular smogs in Beijing and other cities across northern China that have reduced life expectancy by more than five years compared with cities in the south (“Winter heating or clean air?” Almond, 2009).

Britain is on the verge of becoming a post-coal economy, to the celebration of environmentalists, but in truth the transition away from coal has little to do with climate change.

Coal burning in factories and homes, on the railways, and in manufacturing town gas, was responsible for the choking smogs which regularly blanketed London and Britain’s other major cities in the 19th century.