Scargill is right - for 25 years Labour has failed to appreciate King Coal

Robert Lea
12 Mar 2009

IT was always going to be Arthur Scargill who would reopen the deep wounds that have scarred the Labour movement in this the week of the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the miners' strike.

Scargill's claim is that it was not Margaret Thatcher who killed the coal industry but Neil Kinnock; that Thatcher's administration had been close to an agreed settlement with Scargill's National Union of Mineworkers, and it was Kinnock's failure to back the miners that fired up the Tory leader toward her collision course with, and ultimate destruction of, the British coal-mining communities.

Whatever the historical revisionism, the evidence is that it is Kinnock's heirs in New Labour who are hammering nails in the coffin of coal, the Dark Lord of the energy sector.

The UK coal industry may be a shadow of its former self but the dark stuff remains critical to keeping the lights on.

It is little appreciated that coal remains the fuel of choice for more than 33% of the UK's generated electricity, with official figures showing it was only eclipsed as the single largest source of fuel in 2006, when it was overtaken for the first time by gas.

The fact that coal five years ago fired more than 40% of our electricity output shows the fuel's decline, but coal from British mines is still important.

UK coal production has remained steady for much of the last four years, and the Yorkshire behemoth Drax, the country's single largest power station - capable of generating up to 8% of the country's daily consumption -sources half of its coal supplies locally.

Inefficient, dirty coal-fired power stations have been sentenced to death by the European directive against big polluting facilities and the system of financial penalties for plants that emit carbon dioxide.

The existing coal-fired stations have three options. The first is closure, an option already taken up by a third of the stations. The second is to co-fire biomass, the burning of wood chippings or peanut husks with coal, the road that Drax is going down in a bid to reduce the financial penalties for burning coal.

The third option is carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology for the 21st century whereby carbon dioxide is substantially extracted from coal during or after combustion, liquefied and stored in spent oil or gas fields under the sea, or in an old coal mine.

CCS is reckoned to be so serious a tool in the battle against climate change that it was once improbably described by the former Government chief scientist Sir David King as the only hope for mankind.

But the short history of CCS and its (non-)adoption by the UK Government is, like the rest of New Labour's energy policy, a litany of obfuscation, indecision and missed opportunities - to the point where Britain's leading energy boss has now all but written off the technology.

Centrica had been in the vanguard of CCS earlier this decade, proposing to build a plant on Teesside. That was before its plans were knocked back by a Government uncertain about the technology in general, and Centrica's plans in particular.

Centrica chief executive Sam Laidlaw now says that the UK has made so little progress on CCS that we do not know whether it can be proved for use on a large-scale commercial basis, or how expensive it will be.

As such, he believes even if we started now - and the Government is still talking about piloting different CCS technologies - CCS may not be in commercial production until as late as 2030. Drax chief executive Dorothy Thompson agrees, saying there probably will not be anything meaningful until after 2020.

This has put the Government in such a bind that Britain's first new coal station in a generation, Kingsnorth in north Kent - being built by E.ON to replace its decommissioning 40-year-old plant on the site - is the location of the biggest environmental row in years.

E.ON says it will retro-fit CCS when the Government makes its mind up on the technology. The greens say, given the Government's decision-making record, that would mean years of non-carbon captured coal burning.

Coal remains as emotive an issue as it was a quarter of century ago, with its proponents saying we have another 1000 years of the stuff under our feet and that CCS has to be part of a future in which we must not become dependent on foreign-sourced gas or the mass-building of nuclear.

However, sequestrating carbon from coal is one issue, the storage of the highly poisonous by-product is more serious. Does anyone really know that the geology can hold or withstand CO2 piped in on an industrial scale?

Scargill recently challenged the green but nuclear-ambivalent commentator George Monbiot to stand in a room full of atomic radiation for two minutes while Scargill did the same in a room full of carbon dioxide.

Given that one would suffocate pretty quickly and the other would endure a long painful death perhaps does not further either cause.

The problem for coal is that the environmentalists are swaying public opinion to kill it off immediately. After a decade of indecision over clean-coal technology, Labour is consigning it to a slow death, finishing off the job started by Thatcher 25 years ago.