Dave Anderson MP: Making the most of coal

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Coinciding with his Westminster Hall debate on the issue, Labour MP Dave Anderson writes for ePolitix.com on energy policy and the role of coal.


I believe that this country is not capable of delivering sustainable power supplies without the use of coal.

Despite the demise of the UK coal industry, we are burning some 65 million tonnes of coal a year in this country. Much of that coal - well over two thirds - comes from unstable nations with criminally disgraceful levels of health and safety.

We have moved from being the country that had the safest and most technically advanced coal industry in the world into an importer of blood-stained coal.

We could redress this situation if we tapped into the enormous supplies of coal still left in this country, and to my mind that won't happen without government intervention.

In the short term, we need to give support to plans to move the workforce from Welbeck Colliery in north Nottinghamshire to the at-present mothballed colliery at Harworth. This would protect hundreds of jobs and open up 40 million tonnes of high quality coal.

We should also start identifying new accessible areas of undeveloped seams. For example there are proven reserves under the North Sea off both Seaburn and Amble. Similarly there a large reserves in the south west of Scotland.

But even if we ignore the bounty under our own feet we need to develop the technology required to burn coal in a clean and more efficient manner.

There have been huge developments in boiler technology in recent years, but the real hope has to be the development of industrial-scale tests for the capture and storage of carbon.

To that end we should welcome the development of demonstration plants across Europe, but we should listen to industry insiders who say that the proposals don't go far enough.

We could address that problem by giving positive support to the project being developed by the regional development agency in Yorkshire, Yorkshire Forward. They propose to use the infrastructure that is already in place to bring oil and gas supplies ashore from the North Sea and reverse the process and take carbon out to the old wells and cap it under the sea.

Finally, with a view to tapping into seams at levels way beyond that worked anywhere in the world, we should be promoting the underground gasification of coal, a process which captures the waste gases underground.

Newcastle University is leading the World in this field and only the reluctance of private and government investors is holding back its development.

This is a huge agenda, but we face a huge challenge. Turning our back on coal in the 1980s and '90s was a huge mistake. We can't afford to make it again.