The End of Coal in the UK?
September 2024 may will go down as a historic month in the history of the energy transition in the UK.
On Friday 13th September the UK’s High Court quashed planning permission, previously given by Michael Gove as Secretary of State for Levelling Up, to the controversial Coking Coal Mine being proposed in West Cumbria.
This was followed up on the 26th September by the UK Govt’s Coal Authority refusing to grant the developer, West Cumbria Mining Limited, licenses for the underground mining of the coal itself.
And on Monday 30th September, Britain’s last operating coal plant, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, closed. Ending 142 years of coal-powered electricity generation in the UK.
Coal’s demise in the UK has taken a long time
Coal has been mined in the UK since the Romans, and came to prominence as the driving force behind the industrial revolution in the 1700s. It fueled steam engines, then trains, made town gas for lighting, and, from 1882, electricity. It took until 1994 for coal to lose its spot as the fuel that produced the majority of the country’s electricity.
The miner’s strikes of 1984-85 led to a slump in coal production after several decades of unabated growth, and the fuel never reached the same heights again, with natural gas and increasing environmental concerns putting pressure on coal.
In 2000 coal still produced 36% of the UK’s electricity, but the Climate Change Act, rising costs, and the introduction in 2013 of the Carbon Price Support (CPS) (essentially a carbon tax on polluters) put the coal industry into terminal decline.
The Cumbrian Coal Mine
West Cumbria Mining (WCM) Limited’s plan to build a new coal mine to produce coking coal for steel manufacturing has faced various ups and downs.
The project was first approved by the local council in 2019, and came under increasing scrutiny in 2021 in the build-up to the UK hosting COP26 and trying to lead the world in “powering past coal” as co-chair of the Powering Past Coal Alliance. The government seemed to put the project on ice through the COP26 period, but in 2023 Michael Gove, then Secretary of State for Levelling Up, approved the application, thereby authorising the mine’s planning application.
One issue with the project has always been the view that opening new coal mining facilities seems incompatible with the terminal decline of coal and any reasonable pathway to net zero. WCM have long aruged that the coal would power steel manufacturing in the UK and avoid the emissions associated with the import of that coking coal, but that ignores the fact that steelmaking itself must transition away from coal as well - which is already happening with the closure of the Port Talbot blast furnaces in favour of electric arc furnaces that don’t need coal.
See our recent blog on Decarbonising Iron & Steel Manufacturing - for a look at how coal is being replaced in the steel-making industry in South Wales and around the world.
Two campaign groups, Friends of the Earth & South Lakes Action on Climate Change took the government to court over Gove’s decision. The precedent set by a recent supreme court case known as Horse Hill, where the court found that the climate impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be taken into account when deciding whether to approve projects, helped secure a victory for the campaign groups challenging the coal mine.
In his decision, Hon Mr Justice Holgate said:
“the assumption that the proposed mine would not produce a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions, or would be a net zero mine, is legally flawed".