GOING underground
Britain’s coal mining industry is under threat. THOMAS BRIGHT visits one of the country’s last remaining opencast pits to discover what the future holds for this vital resource.
Coal for locomotives may no longer be mined in Britain by 2022 or shortly afterwards. Once remaining coal reserves in current sites have been extracted and stocks have been exhausted, we could be entirely reliant upon imports by the end of the decade. That means British locomotives will not burn British coal for the first time in over 200 years. When Richard Trevithick’s Pen-y-darren locomotive made its pioneering journey in February 1804 near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales – in the heart of one of Britain’s biggest coalfields – it cemented the binding and lasting relationship between coal and railways. The steam locomotive was born from the coal industry, and until the end of standard gauge BR steam in 1968, coal was crucial to railways’ existence, not only powering trains to all four corners of the country but comprising the bulk of railways’ traffic and revenue.
Now it seems that relationship is drawing to a close. Unless the Government grants planning permission for the creation of new mines, coal mining on any significant scale in Britain will cease within two years. In addition to the threat posed by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs’ plan to phase out the sale of coal for domestic use – plus an increasing nationwide desire to dispense with coal altogether and embrace cleaner alternatives – this poses a very serious challenge to preservation’s future. And it’s a problem that cannot be easily overcome.
THE FINAL VOID
Have you ever wondered where coal comes from?
More specifically, have you ever wondered how this vital fuel gets from hundreds of feet below the ground and into the fireboxes of your favourite locomotives?
Coal is such an omnipresent part of railway furniture that we arguably take it for granted. Besides, does it matter where coal comes from, or how it gets there? Coal is coal, isn’t it?
To find out, Steam Railway went to Shotton surface mine in Northumberland, approximately nine miles north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne city centre.
It is one of three pits owned and operated by The Banks Group, and is the largest surface coal mine in England, bordered by the major A1 road to the west and the East Coast Main Line to the east. More importantly for us, however, it is one of just three pits – in addition to Hargreaves’ House of Water pit in Ayrshire and Merthyr (South Wales) Ltd’s Ffos-y-Fran pit near Merthyr Tydfil – that supplies the preservation industry.
It won’t for much longer, however. Shotton is coming towards the end of its operational life. Coal extraction is currently concentrated in the 390-feet-deep pit fittingly dubbed by the miners as ‘the final void’, and even this is already in the process of being filled in. By May of this year, all the coal will have been mined at Shotton and within a couple of years there will be scarcely any evidence there was a mine here – such are the lengths to which Banks goes to restore its sites once their useful days are over.
Normally, the miners would move on to a new site and carry on digging out coal. Compared to deep mines, surface mines like Shotton have more limited working
lives, often operating for between five to ten years or so before production ceases, so organisations like Banks always have a development programme to bring forward new projects to replace exhausted sites.
The group has three potential sites – Bradley West, Dewley Hill and Highthorn – in the planning system, and is currently awaiting the outcome of a decision from the Secretary of State for Communities & Local Government over its planning application for the latter which, if approved, could yield up to three million tonnes over a planned five-year extraction period. However, it has been waiting for four years for planning permission, and there is no indication of when or if the Secretary of State will deliver the verdict.
Banks’ other mines are Brenkley Lane in Northumberland – where coal extraction ceased in December – and Bradley, in County Durham, where production will cease by the end of this year, so if planning permission for Highthorn in Northumberland is not granted, and if both Bradley West and Dewley Hill similarly fail to receive planning consent, then the immediate future of coal supplies looks grim.
Not only will hundreds of skilled workers be made redundant but, more pertinently for the preservation movement, once the currently active sites cease production, those vital sources of supply will disappear.
This status quo is representative of the challenging climate in which Britain’s coal mining industry – now but a forlorn shadow of its former self – finds itself in 2020.
COALS TO (AND FROM) NEWCASTLE
A century ago, coal was king. Without it, Britain could not have become the international industrial powerhouse that it was in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Coal was – quite literally – the rock upon which Britain’s economy, industry and prestige were built.
Today, coal has been all but abandoned. The tipping point was, arguably, December 5-9 1952. For those five days, the ‘Great Smog of London’ enveloped the capital in a choking, sulphurous blanket, reportedly killing between 4,000 and 12,000 people directly and indirectly. The consequences of this disaster heralded the beginning of the end of Britain’s hitherto unbridled love affair with coal and led to the introduction of the 1956 Clean Air Act – a piece of wide-ranging legislation designed to drastically reduce emissions from both households and industry.
Analogous to this was British Railways’ 1955 Modernisation Plan which, among other objectives, sought to eradicate steam as a form of motive power, owing to “the growing shortage of large coal suitable for locomotives” and “the insistent demand for a reduction in air pollution by locomotives.” Nothing changes.
Although many of Britain’s coal-fired power stations were built post-1956, in recent decades, demand for coal has plummeted. Whilst the decline rapidly hastened after the infamous miners’ strikes of the mid-1980s, the privatisation of British Coal in 1994 and the ‘dash for gas’ in the 1990s, as late as 2014, 50 million tonnes of coal was still being consumed by the power generation sector. Since 2015, with the increase in ‘carbon tax’ and the announcement that coal-fired power stations would close by 2025, the proportion of coal-fired generation has fallen to all-time lows.
Coal today is but a bit player in Britain’s energy makeup. The Digest of UK Energy Statistics (DUKES) suggests that coal represented just 3.9% of the country’s energy demand in 2018, and during May 2019, Britain went for a whole fortnight without directly burning a single lump of coal to generate power – although we imported coal-fired power from Europe during that period. Following the closure of Cottam in September last year, and once Aberthaw B and Fiddler’s Ferry close
at the end of March, there will be just four operational coal-fired power stations remaining in Britain (Ratcliffe, West Burton A, Kilroot and Drax, although the latter has been largely converted to burn biomass). By 2025, they will have all closed or been mothballed.
Banks has adapted to a changing UK market for coal. “Five or six years ago, about 90% of Banks Mining’s output went to the power station market,” says Banks Group projects director Barney Pilgrim. “Now, more than 60% of our production goes to the steel, cement, heritage rail, household coal and other industrial markets, and less than 40% goes to the power sector, and we expect this trajectory to continue.”
The “dark, satanic mills” so reviled by the poet William Blake may have been all but eradicated, but after 2025, the steel and cement-making industries alone will still require 5-6m tonnes annually – more than enough to sustain Britain’s coal industry.
Barney says: “All the indicators are that there will be continuing demand from the industrial sector for the next 15 years at least, as raw steel and cement cannot be manufactured at scale without coal as a component for the foreseeable future.”
However, given the recent and well-documented financial difficulties suffered by both the steelmaking plants at Scunthorpe and Port Talbot, there is no