Clean Coal

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Brian Binley

Tuesday 28th February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

Ms Osborne, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship. I am pleased to see so many of my colleagues attending a debate on an important subject: the economic potential of clean coal.

As a child in the 1970s I used the phrase, “taking coals to Newcastle”, to describe the silliest, most useless activity that could possibly be undertaken. I never really thought about the words behind the phrase, of course, except to note that it referred to Newcastle, the city in which I lived and which had been exporting coal since the 13th century. The region powered Britain’s industrial revolution. Recently, when I visited the port of Tyne and saw huge ships unloading coal, the full realisation of the extraordinary change in our relationship to coal was forced on me. Three million tonnes of coal per year are coming up the Tyne, instead of going down and out to the wider world. We are now importing millions of tonnes of coal per year to Newcastle and the same is true for Great Britain, once described as an island built on coal.

According to the Library, in 1920 there were 1.25 million miners in the UK. Today, the UK mining industry provides just over 6,000 jobs directly and supports a similar number in coal power stations and coal transportation, but demand for coal has not fallen to the extent that those figures might imply. In addition to the increased productivity of coal miners, we also need huge levels of imports to satisfy demand. In 2010, we produced 18.4 million tonnes of coal to meet demand of 51.4 million tonnes. What makes that all the stranger is that the UK has thousands of billions of tonnes of coal reserves, offshore and onshore.

Five Quarter, a company spun out of Newcastle university, has licences from the Coal Authority to exploit 2 billion tonnes off the Northumberland coast. Using new technologies and processes, in energy terms that is equivalent to 11 billion barrels of oil; and that is just one company. Yet in 2010 we imported 26.5 million tonnes of coal.

Let us be clear that by importing so much coal we are not reducing the global carbon footprint or improving the safety of mining. Nearly 10 million tonnes of coal a year is imported from Russia. Despite having improved somewhat in recent years, Russia’s mining safety record is still poor, although it is better than China’s. In the UK, we suffered the terrible tragedies of three mining deaths in 2010, the highest for several years. In the same year, 135 Russian miners died at work, including 66 in one explosion.

I applied for this debate because I believe there could be huge potential in exploiting the vast reserves of coal beneath our feet, and I am concerned that the Government are not doing all they can to realise that potential. I should be grateful to hear the Minister’s views on why we import so much coal when we have such vast reserves.

[Mr Brian Binley (Northampton South) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on obtaining this important debate and I welcome her remarks. Will she push the Minister a little bit on clean coal, recognising that there are 300 years of energy need beneath our feet? The hon. Lady touched on that in her opening remarks.

[Chi Onwurah]

I will come to that point. I shall consider it a pleasure to push the Minister, just as the hon. Gentleman describes.

Coal importation does not raise the same issues as gas importation. In terms of energy security, there is no vulnerable single coal pipeline and there is a wider supplier base and a more competitive market for coal, but transporting millions of tonnes of carbon around the world is hardly green and, more importantly, there is in this country the budding technical knowledge to exploit coal in a cleaner way than our competitors.

The first industrial revolution was fuelled by coal and we are now having to deal with the consequences in the form of climate change. Clean coal, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned, is any technology that reduces harmful emissions from burning coal or avoids the need for burning coal altogether to generate electricity in a more sustainable manner.

Carbon capture and storage and underground coal gasification are two areas where the UK has the opportunity to become a world-beater in clean energy production, but we cannot wait for ever. Underground coal gasification is the gasification of a deep coal seam to convert coal to a high energy synthetic gas, which goes by the lovely name of syngas. Both the technology and the gas produced are relatively clean, compared to coal-fired generation and surface mining.