30 years after the miners’ strike a former County Durham pit village is home to the biggest surface coal mining company in the UK. Andy Richardson looks at the future for the coal industry

COAL mines were hell, according to George Orwell, who was awestruck by the subterranean world of “heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space”.

In his 1937 book The Road To Wigan Pier, Orwell deploys some of his sharpest prose to describe his visits to the “lamplit world” which filled the Old Etonian with a deep admiration for pitmen and for the precious mineral they rived from the ground.

Orwell wrote: “Our civilization, is founded on coal, more completely than one realises, until one stops to think about it.

“The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil.”

Thirty years since the miners’ strike, with the pit heads and slag heaps replaced on the North-East skyline by whirring wind turbines, it would be easy to assume that coal plays a trifling role in our lives compared to the cradle-to-grave industry Orwell described.

In its heyday, coal employed more than a million British workers.

At the start of the last century, 100,000 men worked the Durham coalfield, which was peppered by 200 deep shaft mines.

There are now only three deep mines left in Britain and the entire UK coal industry employs fewer people than Nissan’s car factory in Sunderland.

Industry experts reckon deep mining is dead, but opencast operations are viable. To sink a shaft costs £250m, whereas only £15m is needed to made a surface mine operational.

The Northern Echo:
Pitheads, once a feature of the North-East skyline, are now only a memory

Nevertheless, the UK will burn about 50 million tonnes of coal this year and coal-powered stations continue to provide up to 40 per cent of our electricity.

Instead of the coal being hewn from Vane Tempest, Murton or Easington, up to 80 per cent is now shipped from the basins of southern Siberia, Colombia and the US into North-East ports that were once bywords for the export of coal.

Britain seems to have a lovehate relationship with coal.

Green lobbying groups regard it as an industrial pariah, a relic from a time when a carbon footprint was a mark left by a pitman’s boot on a rug.

Only the most blinkered climate change sceptic would deny that burning coal is a blight on our environment.

But advocates of coal insist its economic benefits are huge.

Europe’s economic powerhouse certainly seems to think so. Germany is investing in the future of coal as an energy source, with plans for ten new coal-fired power stations.

Three are being built in the Netherlands.

The development of carbon capture and storage would give coal the chance to become a cleaner option and challenge so-called “green” fuels such as biomass.

The pollution debate appears to be of little concern to Asia’s biggest economies, where an industrial revolution is being fired by fossil fuels.

Demand from India and China will see coal consumption rise from five billion tonnes a year to seven billion tonnes by 2030.

Those types of numbers make the UK government’s dedetermination to more than halve our coal usage – to about 20 million tonnes a year – look like a worthy gesture that will have little impact on climate change.

IN the meantime, the North- East is playing a key role in keeping the coal industry alive.

The UK Coal Authority recently issued Newcastle-based Five Quarter conditional licences to harvest gases from coal seams of the North-East coast. The scheme could create up to 1,000 jobs.

The Northern Echo:
Miners protest against pit closures 30 years ago

Durham City-based Banks has experience of mining and restoring more than 100 surface mines. The business, founded in 1976, now employs 420 people.

For County Durham mining and transport business Hargreaves Services the domestic coal sector provides a rich seam of work. But for how long?

Hargreaves is based in Esh Winning, near Durham City, where customers of the local fish and chip shop, the renowned Fields, buy takeaways that have been cooked in a coal-powered fryer.

Part of Hargreaves’ offices used to house the pit head baths where exhausted workers would cleanse their blackened bodies.

It is now the base for an international group which employs 3,000 people.

“Coal inspires extreme views. There are zealots on both sides of the argument,”

says Gordon Banham, Hargreaves’ chief executive.

“What I fear is that in our desire to be green we are risking jobs and potentially pushing more people into fuel poverty. “As far as I’m concerned, coal is the right answer from an economic point of view. If this country wants no more coal and to be green, I respect that.

But people need to know the truth of what that means in terms of the cost of energy bills and jobs.

“One of the scary scenarios is that if we get power shortages in the future, we could be buying electricity from Germany and the Netherlands that has been generated by coalpowered stations.

“The CO2 will still be going into the atmosphere. That is the insanity of people looking at the green agenda in simplistic terms.”

Mr Banham highlights the challenge facing supporters of coal: “The problem is that while the coal industry was declining, it kept quiet because it was busy trying to keep itself alive. In the meantime, the green agenda lobbied hard.

“When you go into the offices of DEC [Department of Energy and Climate Change] the walls are painted green. There are pictures of wind farms and nuclear power stations everywhere.

There are no pictures of coal mines. Politicians have bought the fantasy. Coal has been forgotten,” he says.

The Northern Echo:
A Miner at work in the Durham Coalfield in the 1970s

“There used to be a minister for coal – now a junior civil servant deals with it because it’s regarded as such a small thing,” says Mr Banham.

“We have a carbon tax on coal that is far higher – £15 per tonne extra – than anywhere else in Europe. We have already worn our sack cloth and ashes.

“The Germans think we are mad. They say: ‘You live in a sea of oil and gas, you have loads of accessible coal under the ground. In Germany they are closing their coal mines because they are too deep and inefficient, and yet you are trying to become the greenest country in Europe’.

“The other bit to remember is that chemicals and the steel plants – huge employers in our region – are warning the Government that if energy costs keep rocketing up, they are going to go elsewhere.

“The Alcan smelter in Ashington closed because the energy costs were too high. “I don’t want that to happen to SSI, Tata or Ineos, on Teesside.

“I say fine, let’s burn less coal, but why do we have to be so far ahead of anyone else in cutting coal consumption? If there was a low cost for renewables I would back them 100 per cent. But the opposite is true.”

A coal station costs about £50 per megawatt of power, whereas wind power costs at least double that amount.

“Politicians and people living in the South don’t see the social depravation in former coal mining areas of the North- East that have never fully recovered since the days of the miners’ strike.

“If you get rid of coal and gas out of the energy mix you will pay twice what you pay now for your energy bill,” reckons Mr Banham. “That will drive more people in the North-East into fuel poverty.

WITH the Government pinning its hopes on renewables, gas and nuclear power, Mr Banham fears for the future of coal in the UK.

His firm is already running a power station in Hong Kong and he has a team in India helping spearhead the country’s bid to double coal production over the next five years.

He adds: “If Britain doesn’t want coal any more, we will do this somewhere else and take well-paid jobs with us. We will take the knowledge built up in the North-East over hundreds of years and deploy it in Asia, where people are crying out for what we do.

“It will be really sad if our Asian business becomes bigger than our UK business and we are listed on the Hong Kong, not the London Stock Exchange.

“What makes me more sad is the knock-on effect in terms of jobs in the North that are linked to energy intensive industries, which will be lost if we continue to put energy bills up.”

The Northern Echo:
Miners at work in the Durham Coalfield in the 1970s – according to George Orwell a subterranean world of “heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space”

Mr Banham concludes: “Coal still has so much to offer. I just hope politicians sit up and realise that before it’s too late.”