INDEX	December 8, 2022
Coal mining in Cumbria?
It is said that Britain is an island of coal surrounded by a sea of fish. Perhaps. But it's certainly true that there's huge reserves of the black stuff underground. One example is that there are vast quantities of anthracite, very high quality coal, deep under the dreaming spires of Oxfordshire, or so the National Coal Board used to say, when there was an NCB. In the long run much of this will be extracted since we will need feedstock for the chemical industries of the 22nd century. Coking coal might also come in handy if there was a Russian ban on the export of natural gas and the Americans wanted to charge too much for LNG, since we could probably use it to make town gas. But the future of the Whitehaven mine (see BBC report at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63895365) simply as a supplier to the steel industry is unpredictable, not least because we can't even know if the steel industry will still exist in a couple of decades time. Cars may be 100% plastic. Even if steel survives there are new technologies for making it which do not involve coking coal. Then there is the perturbing fact that the price of coking coal Jitterbugs about in a way that is deeply unhelpful for a business that needs long term certainty like mining. Eventually we will have cheap, efficient, totally automated mining and at that point Britain has a heck of a lot of coal to extract. But right now I wonder if the real plan is to dig holes under the Irish sea in order to get rid of a lot of low grade nuclear waste from the nearby Sellafield. >
INDEX Jonathan Brind		December 8, 2022