The Green Transition: Coal Drops Hard
Weekly analysis of the shift towards a new economy.
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Coal Drops Hard
It’s a historic day. The UK’s last coal-fired power station has been shut down. That puts an end to over three centuries of the widespread use of the dirtiest of fossil fuels to heat homes, generate electricity and power industry. Before that, it is thought that the Romans used to mine coal to forge iron and heat their Roman baths, over 1500 years ago in Somerset. It was coal that replenished the furnaces in the factories of the Industrial Revolution and turned the UK into a manufacturing powerhouse. It helped Britain, until relatively recently, maintain its position as an energy exporter, and it provided a whole way-of-life to communities up and down the country when, at its peak, over a million people were employed in coal mines and the coal power industry.
It had been hoped, by some, that a controversial new mine in Cumbria could be opened to provide coal for the UK’s steel industry in the near future. But that would have put us clearly in breach of our climate committments, and so earlier this month, the project was blocked in the High Court. Last year, the UK imported 3.2 million tonnes of coal, mainly from the US, and mainly for use in blast furnaces in the steel industry.
Separately today, the steel town of Port Talbot mourns the shutdown of its last blast furnace, leading to at least 2,000 job losses. The decision by the owners, Tata Steel, to transition to the use of a cleaner, greener, electric arc furnace will see the end of traditional “virgin” steelmaking as the plant starts to produce steel entirely by melting recycled scrap by 2027. The end product, however, is thought to be of lower quality. There are concerns that it cannot be used for construction or car-making. Remaining blast furnaces in Lincolnshire and Scunthorpe could also close by the end of this year, which would leave Britain as the first major economy without any virgin steelmaking capacity at all.
These seismic shifts make this a turning point in our history. The UK was the first industrialised nation. It was among the most blasé about the decline of traditional industries over the last four decades as we embraced a services revolution. Could it become the first to fully deindustrialise? A narrative is beginning to emerge that emphases the trade-offs and drawbacks involved in net zero – far from a painless exercise, or a smooth “just transition”, bringing clean, well-paid “jobs of the future” to post-industrial Britain, instead the green revolution seems to have added yet one more causal factor in the slow demise of domestic manufacturing and productive capacities.
This week it was reported that the UK had the highest price of industrial electricity in the world – hardly a propitious offer for manufacturers. The government talks a language of industrial strategy, the “active state”, “securonomics” and “resilience”, but seems little concerned with the loss of strategically essential sectors such as steel production, which makes us ever-more dependent on imports. A fortnight ago, the 100-year-old Grangemouth oil refinery announced its conversion into a fuel import terminal. Sharon Graham, the leader of Unite, warns that these trends, if allowed to continue, will leave oil and gas workers as “the miners of net zero”. And the net zero jobs revolution is yet to materialise.
It’s early days for the new government, but a robust response to these issues is sorely needed. The green transition has been pushed as a way of spurring on a green industrial renaissance that creates jobs, infrastructure and prosperity in held back regions. That all sounds great. But if that’s the plan, then people need to see it start bearing fruit, and fast.
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