Britain approves first new coal mine in 30 years

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Firstly it isn't the first new coal mine in thirty years as plenty of opencast works have come and gone. It would - if it is ever opened and it isn't clear if it will be - be the first new underground mine since Asfordby Colliery opened in 1991 (it closed six years later).

Secondly, the business case for the project is seriously questionable and it is not clear if it would ever be commercially viable: when originally proposed, the idea was to supply coking coal to the blast furnace at the Redcar Steelworks on Teesside using railway links. The steelworks closed forever in 2015. It would not be easy to transport large amounts of coal from West Cumberland to any of the sites in Great Britain that might find a use for it: none of the companies are interested and one has ruled it out completely as coal from the West Cumberland coalfield has a very high sulpher content. So the current 'plan' is to sell the coal on the open market, with the idea that around 85% would be exported out of Teesside. It is not clear how these could translate into a longterm profit at all, let alone one large enough to cover the cost of the capital expenditure needed to sink the pit and buy equipment for it in the first place. It isn't clear why anyone in their right mind would actually invest in this project, which does rather lead to the suspicion that the whole thing has turned into a rent-seeking scam of a very depressing type that we've seen all too often in Britain over the past few decades.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The station at the Redcar site is still there, mothballed since 2019 pending redevelopment. When it ended up topping the least used station table in 2017-18, it promptly attracted an influx of enthusiasts, as generally happens with the "winner" each year.

Yes, the station is there and remains key to whatever plan they have left: the idea seems to be to rail the coal down to it, and from there take it to the docks to sell abroad. But the steelworks with its blast furnace was demolished two weeks ago - yes, the coincidence of the timing does seem a little heavy-handed.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

And let's be clear about this too, the days of deep mining as a labour intensive industry that provides loads of local jobs is long gone. This proposal is, quite cynically and in almost culture war fashion, an attempt to tap into (quite understandable) local nostalgia for those days - but the fact remains that the impact locally will be a drop in the ocean compared to what would have happened had any of the recently mooted nuclear power developments in the area actually gone ahead.

Even if it were to go ahead and even if it were to actually operate for a time (both are very questionable assumptions), it wouldn't employ more than five hundred people which is a small fraction of the workforce of one of the old deep pits: Haig Colliery, which, as you know but others here won't, was the last pit in the region, employed over three thousand when it was shut thirty six years ago. I'm not even sure if many of those five hundred or so would even be local: most mining jobs are skilled jobs and there is obviously no trace of any relevant skills in the region now. This whole thing reminds me quite a lot of the Phoenix Four...