Britain's shift from coal holds lessons for China

(MENAFN- The Peninsula) By John Kemp

Britain’s last deep coal mine closed on Friday bringing the curtain down on an industry that once employed more than 1 million miners at over 3000 collieries.

Coal helped Britain become the first modern industrial power fuelling her factories steel works ships and railways in the 19th century. For contemporary observers abundant and cheap coal was what made Britain more powerful than her rivals in continental Europe and the United States.

But the 20th century has seen a move away from coal. Britain’s pits could not compete with lower cost rivals overseas and coal has been replaced by gas oil nuclear and now wind in the energy mix.

Domestic production peaked at 292 million tonnes in 1913 but in the years after the Second World War it had had fallen to around 220-230 million tonnes.

On the eve of the year-long miners’ strike in 1984/85 output had dropped to less than 130 million tonnes and by last year production had shrivelled to just 12 million tonnes.

The number of deep mines fell from more than 3000 in 1913 and 1500 in 1947 to just 170 before the miners’ strike and now zero. Fewer than 25 open cast sites remained open at the end of 2014.

Coal consumption peaked in 1956 at 221 million tonnes and then declined steadily to just 120 million tonnes on the eve of the miners’ strike. Consumption was just 49 million tonnes in 2014 three quarters of it burned in power stations. Most of the remaining consumption will disappear over the next decade as coal-fired power plants are phased out.

In the last decade coal has been demonised as the dirtiest and most polluting fossil fuel. Eliminating coal as an energy source is the top objective for climate campaigners and public health professionals.

Coal combustion is one of the biggest contributors to climate change because it releases more carbon dioxide than oil or natural gas into the atmosphere.

Coal burning is also a significant source of toxic substances such as mercury as well as tiny airborne particles all of which can cause cancer and other diseases and a significant increase in mortality.

Britain is on the verge of becoming a post-coal economy to the celebration of environmentalists but the transition away from coal has little to do with climate change.

Coal burning in factories and homes on the railways and in manufacturing town gas was responsible for the choking smogs which regularly blanketed London and Britain’s other major cities in the 19th century.

As recently as December 1952 coal contributed to a terrible five-day smog over London that is estimated to have killed 4000 people.

The Great Smog prompted the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1956 which tightened pollution controls for factories and extended them to homes for the first time.

The 1950s marked the high-point of coal consumption which halved over the next 20 years.

Coal consumption was progressively eliminated from the railways gas manufacturing and the collieries themselves by the late 1960s and from most homes and industrial users by the late 1970s.

The transition away from coal coincided with and was facilitated by the discovery of enormous natural gas deposits in the North Sea in 1959 and then oil in 1969. Suddenly Britain had alternatives that were cleaner and cheaper which led to the end of the manufactured gas industry as well as coal’s rapid displacement as a home heating fuel and on the railroads. Between the 1950s and the 1990s the country constructed 19 large nuclear reactors able to supply plentiful amounts of electricity accelerating the shift away from coal.

But even as coal consumption was declining in other sectors its use for electricity generation continued to rise and did not peak until the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Coal in the electricity sector was eventually displaced by nuclear and especially natural gas and more recently by wind farms.

The problem of air pollution was an important catalyst but would not have been sufficient to stimulate the transition if there had not been other cleaner cheaper alternatives available notably gas.

Coal was phased out from specific applications such as railroads gas manufacturing and home heating over a relatively short time frame of 20-30 years but it has taken more than 60 years so far to phase out consumption on a whole-economy basis.

Coal consumption actually increased in some sectors (electricity generation) even as it was being phased out from others (railroads and space heating).

Concerns about pollution health and the general dirt associated with coal combustion all of which tend to be highly local proved far more important in Britain than climate change in catalysing controls on coal.

For the most part coal-fired power plants have been phased out because they could not compete with cheaper sources of power especially natural gas rather than as a result of government action.

The main impact of government policy has been to force the retirement of power plants constructed during the 1960s and 1970s.

Britain’s transition away from coal over the last 60 years holds important lessons for other countries notably China and India.

The local problem of smog rather than global problem of climate change is already forcing a re-evaluation of coal-fired power generation in China.

It may be possible to transition directly from a coal-based energy system to one based around electricity sources like wind and solar but Britain suggests a more phased approach may be more realistic.

The first stage may be shifting from small source coal combustion to coal burning in central power plants and then gradually phasing out coal in the electricity system in favour of gas and renewables.

Much of China’s terrible smog comes from domestic and industrial sources rather than power plants. Ending coal consumption in homes district heating systems steel mills and factories is the top priority then increasing the efficiency of coal-fired power plants and greening the power sector itself.

Reuters