Old King Coal may be set for a return

Oct 15 2007 by Tony Henderson, The Journal

AN audacious bid is being made to make the North the centre of a second coal revolution.

A start could be made with the next five years on tapping into an energy bonanza from the vast coal reserves still buried beneath the North-East.

Efforts are being made to put together a funding consortium which could put the region, with its long mining history, at the head of a second coming for coal.

The prospect of the restoration of Old King Coal in his former stronghold of the North-East was held out yesterday by Newcastle University’s Professor of Energy and Environment Paul Younger.

He said that, despite centuries of mining, the region has exploited only about a quarter of its total coal resources.

But while re-opening deep mines was fraught with difficulties, Prof Younger said that “exciting technologies are now emerging which means we are now in a position to cost-effectively unlock the energy stored in these deep seams, without ever obliging anyone to work in darkness and danger underground.”

Leading the way are advances in high-accuracy borehole drilling, in which energy could be recovered from deep seams by gasification of the coal where it lay by pushing hot steam and oxygen into the coal via boreholes and then drawing the hot gas mixture to the surface.

The process could also be a climate-friendly energy technology as carbon dioxide could be stored in the voids left by extraction.

Prof Younger said that, at a time when there was much hand-wringing about security of energy supplies, the North-East was sitting on some of the best coal reserves in Europe. “It’s crazy,” he said. “My passion is that we’ve got the coal, the need, and the expertise and all we require is the will.”

He described gasification as a “serious sunrise industry” and said that the urgency was for the North-East to act “to put us at the forefront of a technology which is definitely going to go global.”

Talks are now being held through the Newcastle Science City initiative with worldwide experts in the field.

Prof Younger said he believed five years was realistic for an operation producing a significant amount of energy from this technology in the region.

The way had been cleared by major advances in deep drilling methods in the last decade and the fact that, for the first time since commercial mining began in the 16th Century, the UK had become a net importer of energy as North Sea gas and oil dwindles.

Drilling boreholes into unused coal seams can also enable methane gas to be released, where it can be captured for use in gas-fired power stations in a process called coal-bed methane (CBM). This could fill a gap left by the peaking of North Sea gas output eight years ago, with production rates having already fallen by a third.

Preliminary estimates suggest that the UK has CBM reserves roughly 30 times the country’s current total annual natural gas consumption.

Prof Younger said that the lack of borehole data for the deeply-buried coal of the Northumberland Basin means that there is a high probability of future exploitation identifying substantial reserves in the region.

There could also be “immense resources” in deeper portions of the main Great North Coalfield, particularly under the North Sea.

He said: “The North-East has a cluster of companies who are uniquely well placed to take forward the future coal exploitation technologies.”

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In memory of a renowned leader of coal miners

PROF Younger was giving the first annual Thomas Hepburn memorial lecture in Gateshead Old Town Hall before an invited audience of 170 guests.

Thomas Hepburn, who was born at Pelton in County Durham and died in 1864, was a renowned miners’ leader who helped form a union to fight for the rights of the workers he represented. He began work at the age of eight at Fatfield Colliery, and moved to Jarrow and then Hetton Colliery before forming the Northern Union of Pitmen around 1830-31. He later worked in Felling in Gateshead.

Thanks to the legacy of 150 years of the struggle initiated by Thomas Hepburn and his fellow trade unionists, the UK deep coal mining sector came to lead the world in safety standards.

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Why nuclear power is not the answer

WHEN the issue of security of energy supply has been raised in recent years, the Government’s response has been to advocate a new generation of nuclear power plants, said Prof Younger.

But he said: “Even if all the issues of operational safety and radioactive waste disposal were solved beyond all reasonable doubt, four significant problems beset the adoption of nuclear as a security of supply comfort blanket:

The UK has no viable uranium ore reserves.

Although two of the world’s major uranium-producing countries – Canada and Australia – are politically reliable, in both cases there is a disturbing coincidence between the location of suitable ore bodies and the territories of indigenous peoples, whose cultures demand the highest levels of protection from further disturbance, and whose religious and philosophical viewpoints are often inimical to large-scale mining.

Viable uranium ores worldwide are unlikely to last more than 50 years at current rates of extraction, and if extraction increases to supply new power stations in the UK and elsewhere, this will shrink to 25 years or less.

As the grade of uranium ore shrinks, so the carbon footprint of mining and processing it expands. As the heaviest naturally-occurring element, and as one of the most hazardous, uranium is very costly and carbon-intensive to transport.

“So far, the only response to these problems is to press for further research into new ways of generating nuclear power from, say, stock-piled plutonium left over from decommissioning of nuclear weapons.

However, there are formidable engineering and safety hurdles in the way of such developments,” said Prof Younger.