Page 215 Jan 2023 12:41
and the grids across the Continent will be in crisis – and coal will be the only solution.
It is not hard to work out why coal is back. Following its invasion of Ukraine, Russian gas flowing into Europe has been turned off, and with the conflict settling into a bitter stalemate there is little chance of that coming back any time soon.
Imports of liquefied natural gas have partly made up for that, but in an emergency coal is the only back-up available at short notice. The race to net zero has been so rushed, with grand-standing and virtue signalling elevated above every other consideration, that we have been left dependent on wind and solar power far earlier than we should have been. Renewables might be great in the long term, but until we have lots of excess capacity or new forms of storage, they can’t be relied upon. In the meantime, with gas in short supply, we will still need to burn coal as a back-up.
The trouble is, it is by far the dirtiest fuel available, much worse for the environment than gas, oil, not to mention wind and solar and nuclear. Coal is a stop-gap resource. And yet, we should not kid ourselves that it is going to disappear any time soon.
There are still huge reserves of coal in the UK; we have 3.9bn tonnes of identified reserves, but that is a largely meaningless figure since no one has been actively looking for the stuff for a long time, and the more serious estimate is that there are 200bn tonnes that could be exploited. There is even more in Poland, still one of the top 10 coal producers in the world, and plenty more in the former mining regions of France and Germany.
There is plenty of shale gas as well, if only we were bold enough to brush aside the madder conspiracy theorists on social media (funnily enough, Alberta in Canada has yet to be convulsed with earthquakes despite producing tonnes of the stuff) and start extracting it from the ground.
No one wants to keep burning coal for any longer than is absolutely necessary. It is dirty, expensive, and largely obsolete. Likewise, no one would pretend that fracking is the future of the energy industry on a 20 or 30-year timescale. And yet, for the last decade, energy policy has been a mixture of muddle, incompetence, short-sightedness and wishful thinking. It is quite clear that coal is back, and is likely to be feeding electricity grids right across Europe for many years yet.
Instead of constantly scrabbling around for emergency supplies, switching expensive power stations on and off, and trying to pretend it has been phased out when it hasn’t been, we should just be straightforward about it. Coal is going to be around for a while longer yet.
Perhaps then the UK should even be reopening a couple of its mines, and digging it for itself rather than importing it from abroad? The green blob might hate it – but if we still need coal, it might as well be our own instead of someone else’s.
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