Since this coke isn’t for fires it is for production of steel, which, arguably, could be considered a National Strategic Asset, then I suggest you have another look at this article.
We either stop steel production in this country, wipe out an important capability that is necessary to build ships, rail tracks, cars, anything that requires steel and import it all (higher emissions in transportation and manufacture), sending the money and investment out of his country, or we continue steel production but import the coke (higher emissions to mine and transport it) required to manufacture steel, which is usually of a lower quality as we are blessed with high quality coking coal, thus sending money and investment out of this country, or we invest in this country, in skills, jobs and capability and retain a National Strategic Asset.
Although I support the continuation of steel production in this country, I should point out that it can’t really be called a strategic asset if we have to import the iron ore in the first place.
So why would you import both, the import cost can be offset by using local coal and keep the money in the local economy instead of spending it outside of the local economy?
We don’t need to import iron ore either. The steelworks of Redcar were there for a reason, the proximity to the iron ore deposits of the North York Moors, and there were and still is substantial iron ore deposits in the UK. Not that the Greenie and naysayers co-religionists are aware of.
Could not agree more. The natural extension of this argument is the removal of modern manufacturing industry and infrastructure and a reversion to living in burrows in the hillside.
I would have thought that the author would have retired shamefaced from public life after the Death of Stalin.
It is time we called climate activism what it is, a mental health issue, and treated it accordingly
The only coke that modern politicians know about, goes up their snouts, assuming that they are not immersed in the public trough at the time…
Richard Palmer
3 years ago
More misinformation by the MSM. The coal mine in Cumbria is NOT for domestic heating or electricity production, its for coking coal essential in steel production. Fact Fact Fact.
Sorry to be picky, but to be 100% accurate, the carbon/coke requirement is nothing to do with the need to alloy iron with carbon to produce steel.
The coking coal is used in blast furnaces (along with limestone) to combine with the oxygen in iron ore (which is a mix of different iron oxides) to yield pig iron. The oxygen combines with the carbon to produce carbon dioxide which goes out in the flue gases, leaving molten iron. The resulting iron has too much carbon for most uses, so then has to be put through a converter to produce a lower carbon product suitable as the starting point for steel production.
So the clue, isn’t actually in the name.
And just to be absolutely accurate, the coking coal has to be baked first to produce coke (almost pure carbon, which is used in the blast furnaces) + various gases and oils (which are often used as chemical feedstuffs).
Facts matter and the one missing here is that coal can be burnt cleanly in a modern power station. The second fact is that a coal fired power station will produce cheap, reliable energy, unlike useless wind turbines and solar panels.
So what if coal can be burnt cleanly? The fact remains that there isn’t an inexhaustible supply of the stuff. In the past 300 years we’ve used up a large proportion of coal deposits that took nature millions of years to create. It’s not sustainable, so we might as well move on sooner rather than later.
Move on to what? The solutions bieng wielded and foisted on us all rely of fossil fules and hydrocarbons. Nuclear is a greate replacement but the fear bogeyman is there too. We live in a finite world we are told by economists.
It depends what sort of coal, actually: small seam very high calorific value coal would now, due to advances in mining technology, be more available, and is clean burning when compared to German and Other ” brown coals”… Again, Thatcher era conveniently covered up this fact, and that the Yorks, Notts and Derby fields would be economic as technology advanced.
Why?
Would it not be sensible to abandon coal AFTER there is a cheaper, more efficient alternative?
If you want a new pair of shoes, do you throw the old ones away first and then order new?
Of course, nuclear should have been expanded as the French did.
Of course, we should have been fracking for gas for at least the last decade.
But we prematurely shut down coal, generating reliable and affordable electricity and then blew up all but three power stations. There are 300 years of identified coal reserves in the UK. At least enough could be mined economically for the next 50 years, although fracked gas would likely displace gas long before that.
If we weren’t led by malevolent, corrupt incompetents.
I do! And if you were rational and sensible so would you.
Without facts and those enterprising people who make use of them, civilization would go backwards rather than forwards. But perhaps that’s what you want.
Perhaps you should go back to primary school and start over.
A P
3 years ago
As a born and bred marra, currently writing this from the hugely deprived and forgotten town of Whitehaven, I would advise anyone who automatically condemns the idea of this coal mine to come and visit this town and just see for yourself how important these jobs would be.
Greetings fellow jam eater. I came here to complain that as usual this article labels Sellafield a nuclear power station, when in fact the power station at Sellafield (Calder Hall) closed in 2005 and was a minor part of the site.
And yes, jobs are needed – betting shops can’t possibly employ the whole town.
John Smith
3 years ago
If you wanted to “come home to a real fire” in the 1970’s, you bought a holiday cottage in Wales.
Yes, about 250 burnt and not a single prosecution.
Mid Summer Murders in reverse so to speak.
.
Chris Hill
3 years ago
I used to pretend our coal bunker was a Churchill tank with twin hatches, and the gas poker to light the fire was a flamethrower. You don’t get that sort of fun with renewables.
Simon Latham
3 years ago
Coal really is nature’s bounty, like oil and gas. It can be burnt relatively cleanly and we have reserves. Judging by the recent pictures of frozen wind turbines in Texas and snow covered solar panels in Germany, as the grand solar minimum leads to global cooling, we should not rule out old King Coal.
Charles Stanhope
3 years ago
Thank you for a splendid essay.
As our former PM, “Runaway Dave” said so appositely, all this ‘Green stuff is crap’.
Even if one buys into this Emissions rubbish the tiny little UK produces almost nothing in comparison to China or India. Yet HMG, with extraordinary conceit seriously believes that the World looks the UK to set an example!
What utter tosh, they are in fact incredulous at our propensity for self mutilation.
The fact that millions of our fellow Britons are going to suffer completely unnecessary hardscape because of this lunatic Green Agenda is a national disgrace, and those responsible should be arrested for High Treason, sent to the Tower, and subsequently dealt with in the traditional manner, which incidentally for women meant burning on a ‘real fire’.
At the closing of the coal mines the then government convinced the miners pension fund that it would be in the interest of miners if the fund entered into an arrangement where the government would act as guarantor for the payment of the miners pensions,
The arrangement was the government would pay the pensions if the pension fund failed to make enough interest from the investments to pay the pensions
For this guarantee the government would take 50% of the surplus interest after the pensions were maid .
Well successive governments have had billions from the miners pension fund as it has never as far as I’m aware failed to make a profit from its investments.
Over the lifetime of the National Coal Board the employer contribution into the miners pension scheme was less than £1 billion pounds I believe.
Well the £ 50 million a year the government have received as there 50% of the surplus after the pensions are paid has been a very lucrative cash cow for successive governments.
Many miners have died since the mines closed so ( less pensions to pay out = more surplus for the government.
It wont be very long till the government is the biggest benifisury of the miners pension fund ,
An absolute disgrace that any British government would countenance this plundering to continue.
My question is —- who’s pension is next for this treatment ? Post worker’s, Steelworks ?, Railways?
A VERY BRITISH DISGRACE
Superb point, and Thatcher and others conveniently avoided to inform the public that the union pension funds were actually ” Investment brothers in arms” with Britain’s largest quoted companies, and subsidisers of governments via their massive investment in gilts: I suspect that very few people nowadays even know this?
John Lewis
3 years ago
A mention of the effect of green subsidies on fuel bills wouldn’t be out of place.
Stephen Pearson
3 years ago
If this mine is not commissioned then coal will continue being imported from the US and Europe, adding to pollution. Unfortunately it looks as if it will go the same way as another much vaunted energy solution – fracking.
Quentin Vole
3 years ago
Those wishing to blame ‘Fatcha’ for the closure of the UK’s deep mines in the early 80s must explain why nearly all the deep mines across France, Belgium and Germany closed at much the same time. The real reason was more efficient surface transport, which allowed surface-mined coal to be imported from the US and even Australia at far lower cost than any deep mine could achieve.
I think that the unions were militant Marxists was the real reason for the coal disaster. If an approachment was made to the Gov to keep mines open on the basis of unemployment with the goal of not taking in new workers and letting existing ones work out their days at a real, subsidized, wage, I think the public would have backed it. Instead the unions were political rather than worker advocates.
Could have evolved rather than blown up, to everyone’s betterment.
I recall seeing convoys of coal lorries, over 100 I think, on the M4 going from Port Talbot to Llanwern (or the other way, I don’tremember) during the strike. The rail workers refusing to transport Australian coal.
I understand, Aussie coal was cheaper, being just scraped off the ground than deep mined local anthracite.
Why limited claim to Welsh royalty is my great grandfather who was a winding engineer: controlling the lifts that took the miners to the pit face. Their lives in his hands. My father has a memory of his funeral when he was a child and of hundreds of miners following his coffin.
I enjoyed this article. The world moves on but I grew up with a coal fire and feel a nostalgia for that. I know it’s not sensible but there you are.
ralph bell
3 years ago
It’s funny no one has told Germany this who switched from Nuclear to Coal for Electricity generation following The Japan Nuclear catastrophe. Another case of many of the herd environmentalists not understanding the science but just going with the warm feeling option.
Richard Bell
3 years ago
What is really disgraceful is that while this argument is going on the Drax Power Station is BURNING WOOD from USA forests ??? ….. Yes American trees are being cut down and shipped from the USA to the UK and burnt to make electricity !!! …….. How unbelievably STUPID is that ?
So why not import Coal from elsewhere in the world and ship it to the UK to make Steel …… makes perfect sense !!!
The Green Religion will never see or admit that they are WRONG until we are all back in the Stone Age sitting around a camp fire with what wood is left Knapping Flints !!!
Jorge Espinha
3 years ago
Mr Martin, if you really want to see the end of coal don’t write anymore articles like this one. You almost convinced me of the contrary.
Ed Cameron
3 years ago
Ian! Brilliant writing. Loved it. Rolling crackling chuckling and spitting like a… well, like a bonfire.
Glad you like it, when there is hardly a sentence that isn’t nonsense.
Nick Johns
3 years ago
This reads like a pastiche of an Alexei Sayle rant. It quite took me back. Like Sayle’s rants, whilst it has a certain frantic, bilious, splenetic, poetry, it feels like a speech in search of a point.
Malcolm Davies
3 years ago
remember ‘Coal not Dole’….where are the left now ?
This mine would create good well paying jobs, not the neo liberal amazonia minimum wages that the usual economic regeneration projects promise.
cant there be a comprimise between the green loby and industry ? It seems to me again working class communities are being shortchanged….
The left are calling for investment and jobs in renewable energy and more energy efficient homes and businesses. Thatcher knew she could import cheap coal from Eastern Europe and at the same time destroy the heart of the Trade Union movement which with its ethos of collectivism over individualism she saw as an ideological threat to her vision of conservatism. It wasn’t about coal.
Usual socialist rot from you. Militant marxist miners union held the UK to ransom in early seventies causing the country to only run 3 days per week until the union got the concessions it wanted. Last time I checked, our democracy works on the basis of the electorate voting in a Gov’t in Westminster to run the country, not militant unions.
When Scargill called out the miners on strike in 1984, he did so without a ballot. He also foolishly (for the miners cause) called them out going into Summer when coal demand was low. The Gov’t of the day had wisely stock piled coal in an effort to keep the UK’s power on. The nasty dispute that followed no doubt did include errors by the Govt in handling the strike. The sad result was many mining communities lost employment and much more. Much of the reason for that however was the Marxist NUM leadership and their determination to bring the UK to it’s knees as part of their struggle to overthrow ‘the bosses’, be that Coal Board or Conservative Govt, who they did not recognise as legitimate.
The contrast will always be the undemocratic strike led by Scargill with the legitimate, democratic Gov’t led by Margaret Thatcher.
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
‘Pretty soon you won’t be able to buy bags of house coal from garages and supermarkets and coal will disappear as a domestic fuel by 2023.’
This is a tragedy. My parents still have a coal fire and there are few more reassuring sights than returning from a long walk to see the smoke emerging sedately – and harmlessly – out of the chimney. To some extent the climate change scam is harmless, and I would be the first to admit that I have done well from writing about ‘sustainability’ etc for countless corporations and organisations. However, when you remove the simple, harmless, pleasure of a coal fire, you start to do real psychological and medical damage.
Alison Houston
3 years ago
I feel very sick contemplating an old age of staring into an empty grate in the evening. How are we supposed to bear it? Why do they want us to be so miserable and cold, I would rather just die. On the other hand I want the politicians who decided we had to freeze to death in the North of England to be very seriously tortured for years on end, but kept alive in their agony.
“Pretty soon you won’t be able to buy bags of house coal from garages and supermarkets and coal will disappear as a domestic fuel by 2023.”
Is this true?
I live in a big, cold house, I burn tons of coal, will I still be able to burn Ovoids?
I will have to stockpile. Logs are useless and expensive in as much they cost nearly as much but give out half the heat. I don’t live in a wooded area and my husband smashed his wrist up falling off his bike and can’t just go out with the chainsaw anymore.
Will they actually enforce the law if enough people go on burning it?
Those two will be minor sub-groups in the basement of the huge new building for the new Dept of POS, ‘prosecution of speech’ which will employ thousands making sure any hate speech, or any feelings hate speech was made, is rigorously stamped out and lives ruined of any who offended.
Brendan O'Leary
3 years ago
Thatcher had sworn to crush the unions, especially the miners
You left out the bit where Scargill, without letting NUM members vote, initiated massive strikes with the express purpose of bringing down an elected government, as he had with Heath in 74.
Complete idocy simply put.
Its a politcal game being played by the Elite. The climate game like the covid19 contrick has the same common denominators.
Both were invented by computer games called “Models” and both were annouced by idots.Is it ot yet obvious to all that a model cannot be used for predicting life.
We see the same absudity of models (computer generated sequences) bieng used to cerate vaccines.
Models live in the world of fiction, we live in the world of real life. Global warming, global cooling, climate change are fear based, as is covid19. Tools for terrorising the populace – both use and rely unseen bogeymen. C02 an invisible gas, Sars-Cov an invisible virus. Covid-19 and climate change ideologues are intrinsically linked. ‘Remedies’ for both depend on crippling Western economies through lockdowns and spending public billions on green fantasies- Karen Harradine Conwomen
What will be used to replace coal? Wind and Sun and Batteries? (WSB) All the proposed solutions use coal in their creation- so why be so stupid. Clean the emmissions and use sensible solutions to protect the enviroment. Banning or censoring are not sensible and nor is cutting of your nose to spite your face.
WSB~ What Stupid BS
Qui bono.
Last edited 3 years ago by John Alexander
Jez O'Meara
3 years ago
Current Nuclear and further intensive research in nuclear seems the way forward. Sadly we have to rely on French and Chinese “expertise” to make it in the UK, how we lost that ability to do it ourselves here is a national shame.
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago
Give me a miner’s pub and company over any place filled with pontificating eco sandaloid/ racist zealot/ LGBT and / or bourgeois white shod Kayleighs and Tiger Jades, Or similar detritus…
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago
Give me a miner’s pub and company over any place filled with pontificating eco sandaloid/ racist zealot/ LGBT and / or bourgeois white shod Kayleighs and Tiger Jades, Or similar detritus…
Stu White
3 years ago
There’s nothing quite like being down a pit. I’d happily enough to back to it.
SHARMAKE FARAH
3 years ago
A good rule I use in most of these discussions: If someone says the MSM or Mainstream Media is fake, it´s report-worthy because they will almost always post something factually incorrect.
SHARMAKE FARAH
3 years ago
A good rule I use in most of these discussions: If someone says the MSM or Mainstream Media is fake, it´s report-worthy because they will almost always post something factually incorrect.
Stuart Y
3 years ago
I (unfortunately) still reside in the place you speak of (Horden), fortunately live across from the numbered streets but can honestly say having lived all around the world have never been in such a bleak and uninspiring place.
Having said that this place was abandoned to the literal dregs of society long ago, but their are quite a few of the old timers hanging onto what was a testament to old style hard work and real community.
Stuart Y
3 years ago
I (unfortunately) still reside in the place you speak of (Horden), fortunately live across from the numbered streets but can honestly say having lived all around the world have never been in such a bleak and uninspiring place.
Having said that this place was abandoned to the literal dregs of society long ago, but their are quite a few of the old timers hanging onto what was a testament to old style hard work and real community.
David Fülöp
3 years ago
As I understood the reasoning behind this new mine was that the coal was essential for UK based steel production.
Can somebody enlighten me whether this was true or not ? If true then how would it NOT make sense to open the mine in the UK instead of having to import it?
G Matthews
3 years ago
In this discussion nobody has noticed that we import 240,000 tonnes of coal a year from Russia. Does anyone seriously think that coal mined in Russia is clean and has been mined with health and safety in mind? Why do we outsource our crap to other countries with lower standards rather than dealing with it ourselves? The responsible thing to do would be to say that if we still need some coal, we should mine it ourselves and take responsibility for the pollution ourselves.
The major problem is that over the last 60 to 70 years , those who make policy decisions have no technical expertise. The days when a Tory MP may have been an Engineer in the Armed Forces or owned an engineering firm or a Labour MP a former craftsman who had risen to a a foremen, are long gone.
Well it looks like HMG and CCC will bow to the inevitable climate zeitgeist and coal box the Woodhouse colliery scheme, since it looks like gas may provide a suitable alternative in the steel making process. Actually I was afraid that the owners of the site would sell it to the Indians, or god forbid, the Chinese. Still, once the umpteen toxic chemicals,left by it’s previous owners,have been removed it will make a lovely, healthy leisure area overlooking the Irish Sea. Why not name it Woodhouse Park?.
Last edited 3 years ago by John Huddart
Richard Carpenter
3 years ago
As one of Ian Martin’s contemporaries, I read this piece mostly as a love letter from us boomers to our evaporated childhood of comforting certainties – toxic and unsustainable as they may have been.
Ian may disagree. If he does I’m sure he’ll gently correct me with that tact and delicacy for which he is rightly renowned.
Last edited 3 years ago by Richard Carpenter
Margaret Donaldson
3 years ago
I was brought up in black air, black houses and streets, black washing lines and black snot when you blew your nose. During the 1980s and 1990s when pits were being closed and miners losing their jobs and their culture, I ventured to suggest to my father that it was a shame. He turned to me and said, ‘What civilised country would send men down to work in conditions like that?’ For once I had to concede. Wales, Lanarkshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire all green and pleasant again. No black spit for the miner or black snot for the rest. Even so, if a new mine could be automated and the coal burned with 97 percent efficiency, it might be worth it. It remains a significant strategic resource.
Richard Hazell
3 years ago
Heath won the popular vote in the 1974 “Who governs Britain?” election but because constituencies were so unequal in size in those days Labour won more seats.
Sean MacSweeney
3 years ago
Enjoyed this walk down memory lane, was shocked that no one was held accountable for Aberfan though, I was hoping we could reverse the misery of decimalisation and go back to 240 pence in the pound again, also Fahrenheit usage, now we are out of the EU we can make metrication obsolete
Aberfan, 2008 Banking Fraud, Grenfell. No-one is ever held to account.
Andrew Martin
3 years ago
” The perfect alignment of public support….” that is all you need to know about why the Thatcher revolution has been such a success. It was what the wider public wanted . Despite the tone and tenor of this article that which it praises was never possible while we were in thrall to the left.
Dewi Jones
3 years ago
The negative effects of global warming will make COVID look like a walk in the park. Unless we accept the need for radically different approaches towards our environment the cost to the human race will be catastrophic. Unfortunately, most politicians put self interests and short term assessments first.
But it isn’t coming to an end: we love our Heritage Steam Train Industry all the more, and Ian Martin breathes not one word about that. #Brexit is driven by nostalgia (and/or tax dodging), and the beating heart of our nostalgia factory is riding on a steam train, at Haworth, Pickering, Ribblehead, or out of York. If we can’t ride on one we still herd and huddle by the lines with our clicky cameras.
How are we going to give the Flying Scotsman a sustainable future – after its 3 million pound retro-refit – if we can’t shovel coal into it?
alistair richardson
3 years ago
We bought a terraced house in a post-industrial part of Durham City in the early 80s for 3 grand. Tell the young people these days that and they won’t believe you… Its subsequently been knocked down, not with us in it, along with the rest of the terrace to provide space to provide flats for posh Durham yooni students. I’m sure there’s a metaphor for something lurking there…
Steve Hill
3 years ago
1984-Conservative government close down coal mines-Left outraged. 2021-Conservative government open coal mine-Left outraged. Crazy world eh?
Charles Hedges
3 years ago
Underground Coal Gasification
Released By Royal Academy of Engineering
INGENIA ISSUE 43 JUNE 2010
BIOGRAPHIES – Paul Younger FREng, Jon Gluyas, Martin Cox and Dermot Roddy
Paul Younger FREng is Director of the Newcastle Institute for Research on Sustainability, based at Newcastle University.
He is an environmental engineer with particular expertise in the management of abandoned coalfields.
Jon Gluyas is Durham University’s first professor of Geoenergy, Carbon Capture and Storage, and is currently Chairman of the British
Geological Survey. Previously in the industry, Jon founded two oil companies and is a former President of the Petroleum Exploration
Society of Great Britain.
Martin Cox of Aberdeen Drilling Management has been an engineer in the energy industry for 30 years, starting as a Student Apprentice
in the NCB Deep Coal Mines division followed by 25 years in the oil and gas industry in the UK and overseas.
Dermot Roddy is Science City Professor of Energy and Director of the Sir Joseph Swan Institute for Energy Research at Newcastle
University. His industrial background encompasses petrochemicals and renewable energy.
Since this coke isn’t for fires it is for production of steel, which, arguably, could be considered a National Strategic Asset, then I suggest you have another look at this article.
We either stop steel production in this country, wipe out an important capability that is necessary to build ships, rail tracks, cars, anything that requires steel and import it all (higher emissions in transportation and manufacture), sending the money and investment out of his country, or we continue steel production but import the coke (higher emissions to mine and transport it) required to manufacture steel, which is usually of a lower quality as we are blessed with high quality coking coal, thus sending money and investment out of this country, or we invest in this country, in skills, jobs and capability and retain a National Strategic Asset.
Although I support the continuation of steel production in this country, I should point out that it can’t really be called a strategic asset if we have to import the iron ore in the first place.
So why would you import both, the import cost can be offset by using local coal and keep the money in the local economy instead of spending it outside of the local economy?
We don’t need to import iron ore either. The steelworks of Redcar were there for a reason, the proximity to the iron ore deposits of the North York Moors, and there were and still is substantial iron ore deposits in the UK. Not that the Greenie and naysayers co-religionists are aware of.
Could not agree more. The natural extension of this argument is the removal of modern manufacturing industry and infrastructure and a reversion to living in burrows in the hillside.
I would have thought that the author would have retired shamefaced from public life after the Death of Stalin.
It is time we called climate activism what it is, a mental health issue, and treated it accordingly
The only coke that modern politicians know about, goes up their snouts, assuming that they are not immersed in the public trough at the time…
More misinformation by the MSM. The coal mine in Cumbria is NOT for domestic heating or electricity production, its for coking coal essential in steel production. Fact Fact Fact.
Facts mean nothing to the MSM. Or any of our various governments.
quite, coking coal to make carbon steel like for railway lines or construction of bridges, buildings etc.Carbon steel, the clue is in the name.
Sorry to be picky, but to be 100% accurate, the carbon/coke requirement is nothing to do with the need to alloy iron with carbon to produce steel.
The coking coal is used in blast furnaces (along with limestone) to combine with the oxygen in iron ore (which is a mix of different iron oxides) to yield pig iron. The oxygen combines with the carbon to produce carbon dioxide which goes out in the flue gases, leaving molten iron. The resulting iron has too much carbon for most uses, so then has to be put through a converter to produce a lower carbon product suitable as the starting point for steel production.
So the clue, isn’t actually in the name.
And just to be absolutely accurate, the coking coal has to be baked first to produce coke (almost pure carbon, which is used in the blast furnaces) + various gases and oils (which are often used as chemical feedstuffs).
Facts matter and the one missing here is that coal can be burnt cleanly in a modern power station. The second fact is that a coal fired power station will produce cheap, reliable energy, unlike useless wind turbines and solar panels.
So what if coal can be burnt cleanly? The fact remains that there isn’t an inexhaustible supply of the stuff. In the past 300 years we’ve used up a large proportion of coal deposits that took nature millions of years to create. It’s not sustainable, so we might as well move on sooner rather than later.
Move on to what? The solutions bieng wielded and foisted on us all rely of fossil fules and hydrocarbons. Nuclear is a greate replacement but the fear bogeyman is there too. We live in a finite world we are told by economists.
Underground coal gasification.
If anyone had ever been able to get it to work reliably.
The International Energy Agency, in 2013, estimated that the total remaining recoverable reserves of coal was 3000 years.
It depends what sort of coal, actually: small seam very high calorific value coal would now, due to advances in mining technology, be more available, and is clean burning when compared to German and Other ” brown coals”… Again, Thatcher era conveniently covered up this fact, and that the Yorks, Notts and Derby fields would be economic as technology advanced.
Why?
Would it not be sensible to abandon coal AFTER there is a cheaper, more efficient alternative?
If you want a new pair of shoes, do you throw the old ones away first and then order new?
Of course, nuclear should have been expanded as the French did.
Of course, we should have been fracking for gas for at least the last decade.
But we prematurely shut down coal, generating reliable and affordable electricity and then blew up all but three power stations. There are 300 years of identified coal reserves in the UK. At least enough could be mined economically for the next 50 years, although fracked gas would likely displace gas long before that.
If we weren’t led by malevolent, corrupt incompetents.
Who cares about facts these days?
Indeed.
I do! And if you were rational and sensible so would you.
Without facts and those enterprising people who make use of them, civilization would go backwards rather than forwards. But perhaps that’s what you want.
Perhaps you should go back to primary school and start over.
As a born and bred marra, currently writing this from the hugely deprived and forgotten town of Whitehaven, I would advise anyone who automatically condemns the idea of this coal mine to come and visit this town and just see for yourself how important these jobs would be.
So much for the Red Wall then?
Greetings fellow jam eater. I came here to complain that as usual this article labels Sellafield a nuclear power station, when in fact the power station at Sellafield (Calder Hall) closed in 2005 and was a minor part of the site.
And yes, jobs are needed – betting shops can’t possibly employ the whole town.
If you wanted to “come home to a real fire” in the 1970’s, you bought a holiday cottage in Wales.
Beat me to it!
Yes, I remember that cruelly funny sketch.
You still can apparently
Yes, about 250 burnt and not a single prosecution.
Mid Summer Murders in reverse so to speak.
.
I used to pretend our coal bunker was a Churchill tank with twin hatches, and the gas poker to light the fire was a flamethrower. You don’t get that sort of fun with renewables.
Coal really is nature’s bounty, like oil and gas. It can be burnt relatively cleanly and we have reserves. Judging by the recent pictures of frozen wind turbines in Texas and snow covered solar panels in Germany, as the grand solar minimum leads to global cooling, we should not rule out old King Coal.
Thank you for a splendid essay.
As our former PM, “Runaway Dave” said so appositely, all this ‘Green stuff is crap’.
Even if one buys into this Emissions rubbish the tiny little UK produces almost nothing in comparison to China or India. Yet HMG, with extraordinary conceit seriously believes that the World looks the UK to set an example!
What utter tosh, they are in fact incredulous at our propensity for self mutilation.
The fact that millions of our fellow Britons are going to suffer completely unnecessary hardscape because of this lunatic Green Agenda is a national disgrace, and those responsible should be arrested for High Treason, sent to the Tower, and subsequently dealt with in the traditional manner, which incidentally for women meant burning on a ‘real fire’.
At the closing of the coal mines the then government convinced the miners pension fund that it would be in the interest of miners if the fund entered into an arrangement where the government would act as guarantor for the payment of the miners pensions,
The arrangement was the government would pay the pensions if the pension fund failed to make enough interest from the investments to pay the pensions
For this guarantee the government would take 50% of the surplus interest after the pensions were maid .
Well successive governments have had billions from the miners pension fund as it has never as far as I’m aware failed to make a profit from its investments.
Over the lifetime of the National Coal Board the employer contribution into the miners pension scheme was less than £1 billion pounds I believe.
Well the £ 50 million a year the government have received as there 50% of the surplus after the pensions are paid has been a very lucrative cash cow for successive governments.
Many miners have died since the mines closed so ( less pensions to pay out = more surplus for the government.
It wont be very long till the government is the biggest benifisury of the miners pension fund ,
An absolute disgrace that any British government would countenance this plundering to continue.
My question is —- who’s pension is next for this treatment ? Post worker’s, Steelworks ?, Railways?
A VERY BRITISH DISGRACE
Yes, the UK has taken a lot of Double First’s in ‘Disgrace’ since 1945, and we are on track to take a PhD for another very soon.
Superb point, and Thatcher and others conveniently avoided to inform the public that the union pension funds were actually ” Investment brothers in arms” with Britain’s largest quoted companies, and subsidisers of governments via their massive investment in gilts: I suspect that very few people nowadays even know this?
A mention of the effect of green subsidies on fuel bills wouldn’t be out of place.
If this mine is not commissioned then coal will continue being imported from the US and Europe, adding to pollution. Unfortunately it looks as if it will go the same way as another much vaunted energy solution – fracking.
Those wishing to blame ‘Fatcha’ for the closure of the UK’s deep mines in the early 80s must explain why nearly all the deep mines across France, Belgium and Germany closed at much the same time. The real reason was more efficient surface transport, which allowed surface-mined coal to be imported from the US and even Australia at far lower cost than any deep mine could achieve.
I think that the unions were militant Marxists was the real reason for the coal disaster. If an approachment was made to the Gov to keep mines open on the basis of unemployment with the goal of not taking in new workers and letting existing ones work out their days at a real, subsidized, wage, I think the public would have backed it. Instead the unions were political rather than worker advocates.
Could have evolved rather than blown up, to everyone’s betterment.
They had perhaps only stayed open as long as they had because of nationalisation and fear of unions.
I recall seeing convoys of coal lorries, over 100 I think, on the M4 going from Port Talbot to Llanwern (or the other way, I don’tremember) during the strike. The rail workers refusing to transport Australian coal.
I understand, Aussie coal was cheaper, being just scraped off the ground than deep mined local anthracite.
Why limited claim to Welsh royalty is my great grandfather who was a winding engineer: controlling the lifts that took the miners to the pit face. Their lives in his hands. My father has a memory of his funeral when he was a child and of hundreds of miners following his coffin.
I enjoyed this article. The world moves on but I grew up with a coal fire and feel a nostalgia for that. I know it’s not sensible but there you are.
It’s funny no one has told Germany this who switched from Nuclear to Coal for Electricity generation following The Japan Nuclear catastrophe. Another case of many of the herd environmentalists not understanding the science but just going with the warm feeling option.
What is really disgraceful is that while this argument is going on the Drax Power Station is BURNING WOOD from USA forests ??? ….. Yes American trees are being cut down and shipped from the USA to the UK and burnt to make electricity !!! …….. How unbelievably STUPID is that ?
So why not import Coal from elsewhere in the world and ship it to the UK to make Steel …… makes perfect sense !!!
The Green Religion will never see or admit that they are WRONG until we are all back in the Stone Age sitting around a camp fire with what wood is left Knapping Flints !!!
Mr Martin, if you really want to see the end of coal don’t write anymore articles like this one. You almost convinced me of the contrary.
Ian! Brilliant writing. Loved it. Rolling crackling chuckling and spitting like a… well, like a bonfire.
Glad you like it, when there is hardly a sentence that isn’t nonsense.
This reads like a pastiche of an Alexei Sayle rant. It quite took me back. Like Sayle’s rants, whilst it has a certain frantic, bilious, splenetic, poetry, it feels like a speech in search of a point.
remember ‘Coal not Dole’….where are the left now ?
This mine would create good well paying jobs, not the neo liberal amazonia minimum wages that the usual economic regeneration projects promise.
cant there be a comprimise between the green loby and industry ? It seems to me again working class communities are being shortchanged….
Surely you mean “Shafted”, or maybe, in this particular case’ Un-shafted.
The left are calling for investment and jobs in renewable energy and more energy efficient homes and businesses. Thatcher knew she could import cheap coal from Eastern Europe and at the same time destroy the heart of the Trade Union movement which with its ethos of collectivism over individualism she saw as an ideological threat to her vision of conservatism. It wasn’t about coal.
Usual socialist rot from you. Militant marxist miners union held the UK to ransom in early seventies causing the country to only run 3 days per week until the union got the concessions it wanted. Last time I checked, our democracy works on the basis of the electorate voting in a Gov’t in Westminster to run the country, not militant unions.
When Scargill called out the miners on strike in 1984, he did so without a ballot. He also foolishly (for the miners cause) called them out going into Summer when coal demand was low. The Gov’t of the day had wisely stock piled coal in an effort to keep the UK’s power on. The nasty dispute that followed no doubt did include errors by the Govt in handling the strike. The sad result was many mining communities lost employment and much more. Much of the reason for that however was the Marxist NUM leadership and their determination to bring the UK to it’s knees as part of their struggle to overthrow ‘the bosses’, be that Coal Board or Conservative Govt, who they did not recognise as legitimate.
The contrast will always be the undemocratic strike led by Scargill with the legitimate, democratic Gov’t led by Margaret Thatcher.
‘Pretty soon you won’t be able to buy bags of house coal from garages and supermarkets and coal will disappear as a domestic fuel by 2023.’
This is a tragedy. My parents still have a coal fire and there are few more reassuring sights than returning from a long walk to see the smoke emerging sedately – and harmlessly – out of the chimney. To some extent the climate change scam is harmless, and I would be the first to admit that I have done well from writing about ‘sustainability’ etc for countless corporations and organisations. However, when you remove the simple, harmless, pleasure of a coal fire, you start to do real psychological and medical damage.
I feel very sick contemplating an old age of staring into an empty grate in the evening. How are we supposed to bear it? Why do they want us to be so miserable and cold, I would rather just die. On the other hand I want the politicians who decided we had to freeze to death in the North of England to be very seriously tortured for years on end, but kept alive in their agony.
https://solidfuel.co.uk/solid-fuel-wood-burning-news/
Thanks for that link.
You should be alright if you buy it from a Coal Merchant by the hundredweight or perhaps half hundredweight.
The 10-20kg bags have obviously had it, sadly.
However don’t you feel virtuous about all those ‘hidden’ Green Taxes/Subsidies you are already paying?
.
I think you’re spotted the MMCC followers main plan just die
If Corona doesn’t kill you the Cold soon will,
Or as our wonderful PM might say:
STAY AT HOME.
FREEZE TO DEATH.
SAVE THE NHS.
North west. I’m with you on that one.
“Pretty soon you won’t be able to buy bags of house coal from garages and supermarkets and coal will disappear as a domestic fuel by 2023.”
Is this true?
I live in a big, cold house, I burn tons of coal, will I still be able to burn Ovoids?
I will have to stockpile. Logs are useless and expensive in as much they cost nearly as much but give out half the heat. I don’t live in a wooded area and my husband smashed his wrist up falling off his bike and can’t just go out with the chainsaw anymore.
Will they actually enforce the law if enough people go on burning it?
Yes, there will be Coal Marshalls, alongside Covid Marshalls in ‘Brave New Boris Britain’.
Those two will be minor sub-groups in the basement of the huge new building for the new Dept of POS, ‘prosecution of speech’ which will employ thousands making sure any hate speech, or any feelings hate speech was made, is rigorously stamped out and lives ruined of any who offended.
You left out the bit where Scargill, without letting NUM members vote, initiated massive strikes with the express purpose of bringing down an elected government, as he had with Heath in 74.
Fortunately, Scargill got his just deserts.
Complete idocy simply put.
Its a politcal game being played by the Elite. The climate game like the covid19 contrick has the same common denominators.
Both were invented by computer games called “Models” and both were annouced by idots.Is it ot yet obvious to all that a model cannot be used for predicting life.
We see the same absudity of models (computer generated sequences) bieng used to cerate vaccines.
Models live in the world of fiction, we live in the world of real life.
Global warming,global cooling, climate change are fear based, as is covid19. Tools for terrorising the populace – both use and rely unseen bogeymen. C02 an invisible gas, Sars-Cov an invisible virus.Covid-19 and climate change ideologues are intrinsically linked. ‘Remedies’ for both depend on crippling Western economies through lockdowns and spending public billions on green fantasies- Karen Harradine Conwomen
What will be used to replace coal? Wind and Sun and Batteries? (WSB) All the proposed solutions use coal in their creation- so why be so stupid. Clean the emmissions and use sensible solutions to protect the enviroment. Banning or censoring are not sensible and nor is cutting of your nose to spite your face.
WSB~ What Stupid BS
Qui bono.
Current Nuclear and further intensive research in nuclear seems the way forward. Sadly we have to rely on French and Chinese “expertise” to make it in the UK, how we lost that ability to do it ourselves here is a national shame.
Give me a miner’s pub and company over any place filled with pontificating eco sandaloid/ racist zealot/ LGBT and / or bourgeois white shod Kayleighs and Tiger Jades, Or similar detritus…
Give me a miner’s pub and company over any place filled with pontificating eco sandaloid/ racist zealot/ LGBT and / or bourgeois white shod Kayleighs and Tiger Jades, Or similar detritus…
There’s nothing quite like being down a pit. I’d happily enough to back to it.
A good rule I use in most of these discussions: If someone says the MSM or Mainstream Media is fake, it´s report-worthy because they will almost always post something factually incorrect.
A good rule I use in most of these discussions: If someone says the MSM or Mainstream Media is fake, it´s report-worthy because they will almost always post something factually incorrect.
I (unfortunately) still reside in the place you speak of (Horden), fortunately live across from the numbered streets but can honestly say having lived all around the world have never been in such a bleak and uninspiring place.
Having said that this place was abandoned to the literal dregs of society long ago, but their are quite a few of the old timers hanging onto what was a testament to old style hard work and real community.
I (unfortunately) still reside in the place you speak of (Horden), fortunately live across from the numbered streets but can honestly say having lived all around the world have never been in such a bleak and uninspiring place.
Having said that this place was abandoned to the literal dregs of society long ago, but their are quite a few of the old timers hanging onto what was a testament to old style hard work and real community.
As I understood the reasoning behind this new mine was that the coal was essential for UK based steel production.
Can somebody enlighten me whether this was true or not ? If true then how would it NOT make sense to open the mine in the UK instead of having to import it?
In this discussion nobody has noticed that we import 240,000 tonnes of coal a year from Russia. Does anyone seriously think that coal mined in Russia is clean and has been mined with health and safety in mind? Why do we outsource our crap to other countries with lower standards rather than dealing with it ourselves? The responsible thing to do would be to say that if we still need some coal, we should mine it ourselves and take responsibility for the pollution ourselves.
The major problem is that over the last 60 to 70 years , those who make policy decisions have no technical expertise. The days when a Tory MP may have been an Engineer in the Armed Forces or owned an engineering firm or a Labour MP a former craftsman who had risen to a a foremen, are long gone.
But it’s more important, apparently, to have “professional” politicians than people who know what they are talking about. Apparently.
Can we go back to having a discussion about anthropogenic global warming?
No.
Are you some sort of Denier then? Because deniers of all sorts are being catalogued for the future purges, I hope your affairs are in order.
have you paid your flat earth society sub too?
no
Well it looks like HMG and CCC will bow to the inevitable climate zeitgeist and coal box the Woodhouse colliery scheme, since it looks like gas may provide a suitable alternative in the steel making process. Actually I was afraid that the owners of the site would sell it to the Indians, or god forbid, the Chinese. Still, once the umpteen toxic chemicals,left by it’s previous owners,have been removed it will make a lovely, healthy leisure area overlooking the Irish Sea. Why not name it Woodhouse Park?.
As one of Ian Martin’s contemporaries, I read this piece mostly as a love letter from us boomers to our evaporated childhood of comforting certainties – toxic and unsustainable as they may have been.
Ian may disagree. If he does I’m sure he’ll gently correct me with that tact and delicacy for which he is rightly renowned.
I was brought up in black air, black houses and streets, black washing lines and black snot when you blew your nose. During the 1980s and 1990s when pits were being closed and miners losing their jobs and their culture, I ventured to suggest to my father that it was a shame. He turned to me and said, ‘What civilised country would send men down to work in conditions like that?’ For once I had to concede. Wales, Lanarkshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire all green and pleasant again. No black spit for the miner or black snot for the rest. Even so, if a new mine could be automated and the coal burned with 97 percent efficiency, it might be worth it. It remains a significant strategic resource.
Heath won the popular vote in the 1974 “Who governs Britain?” election but because constituencies were so unequal in size in those days Labour won more seats.
Enjoyed this walk down memory lane, was shocked that no one was held accountable for Aberfan though, I was hoping we could reverse the misery of decimalisation and go back to 240 pence in the pound again, also Fahrenheit usage, now we are out of the EU we can make metrication obsolete
Aberfan, 2008 Banking Fraud, Grenfell. No-one is ever held to account.
” The perfect alignment of public support….” that is all you need to know about why the Thatcher revolution has been such a success. It was what the wider public wanted . Despite the tone and tenor of this article that which it praises was never possible while we were in thrall to the left.
The negative effects of global warming will make COVID look like a walk in the park. Unless we accept the need for radically different approaches towards our environment the cost to the human race will be catastrophic. Unfortunately, most politicians put self interests and short term assessments first.
How has the climate varied over the last 550 M years and why ?
rubbish
But it isn’t coming to an end: we love our Heritage Steam Train Industry all the more, and Ian Martin breathes not one word about that. #Brexit is driven by nostalgia (and/or tax dodging), and the beating heart of our nostalgia factory is riding on a steam train, at Haworth, Pickering, Ribblehead, or out of York. If we can’t ride on one we still herd and huddle by the lines with our clicky cameras.
How are we going to give the Flying Scotsman a sustainable future – after its 3 million pound retro-refit – if we can’t shovel coal into it?
We bought a terraced house in a post-industrial part of Durham City in the early 80s for 3 grand. Tell the young people these days that and they won’t believe you… Its subsequently been knocked down, not with us in it, along with the rest of the terrace to provide space to provide flats for posh Durham yooni students. I’m sure there’s a metaphor for something lurking there…
1984-Conservative government close down coal mines-Left outraged. 2021-Conservative government open coal mine-Left outraged. Crazy world eh?
Underground Coal Gasification
Released By Royal Academy of Engineering
INGENIA ISSUE 43 JUNE 2010
BIOGRAPHIES – Paul Younger FREng, Jon Gluyas, Martin Cox and Dermot Roddy
Paul Younger FREng is Director of the Newcastle Institute for Research on Sustainability, based at Newcastle University.
He is an environmental engineer with particular expertise in the management of abandoned coalfields.
Jon Gluyas is Durham University’s first professor of Geoenergy, Carbon Capture and Storage, and is currently Chairman of the British
Geological Survey. Previously in the industry, Jon founded two oil companies and is a former President of the Petroleum Exploration
Society of Great Britain.
Martin Cox of Aberdeen Drilling Management has been an engineer in the energy industry for 30 years, starting as a Student Apprentice
in the NCB Deep Coal Mines division followed by 25 years in the oil and gas industry in the UK and overseas.
Dermot Roddy is Science City Professor of Energy and Director of the Sir Joseph Swan Institute for Energy Research at Newcastle
University. His industrial background encompasses petrochemicals and renewable energy.