UK Coal Mine Legal Battle puts Sustainability in Spotlight

Environmental campaigners are fighting what would be the UK’s first new deep coal mine in over 30 years, with climate groups calling the decision “unlawful”.

The legal action may concern just one small coal mine in a nation that has virtually no others, but the battle provides a perfect example of the complicated relationship the world now has with fossil fuels that once powered the entire globe.    

Lawyers for Friends of the Earth are challenging the decision to give planning permission to the Woodhouse Colliery project in Whitehaven, northwest England.

The UK government rubber stamped the mine in 2022. The developer, West Cumbria Mining, intends to sell coking coal from the mine primarily to overseas buyers for making steel, Reuters reports.

Demand for coking coal for steelmaking is strong

And this is the rub, because demand for certain types of coal remains strong. Chief among which is demand for coking coal – also known as metallurgical coal, because this is an essential fuel for the blast furnaces used in steelmaking, and is used to produce about 70% of the world’s 1.8 billion tons of steel each year. 

Lawyers are arguing the emissions caused by burning the coal were not included in the developers climate assessment and they wrongly treated the mine as net zero.

The lawsuit was given a boost last week when the UK’s new Labour government said it was no longer going to defend the claim. It comes after the country’s Supreme Court ruled that all emissions produced either on site or down the supply need to be fully considered when looking at whether new fossil fuel sites are being approved.

“West Cumbria Mining strongly refutes the claimant’s repeated mischaracterisation of the development proposals, the evidence that was presented and the Inspector and Secretary of State’s lawful appraisal of them,” the company’s lawyers said in documents.

In Britain, coal seen as relic of its industrial past 

But Britain’s relationship with ‘black gold’, as it was once dubbed, is now almost non-existent, and it is seen as a relic of the country’s industrial past.

Unlike other major coal-producing countries such as Germany, Poland and China, Britain’s coal industry reached its production peak in 1913, when it employed hundreds of thousands of workers and extracted 287 million tonnes of coal. 

Today, China is the world's largest coal producer, mining 3.9bn tonnes in 2022. India, the second-largest producer, extracted 716mn tonnes in the same year, while Australia, a significant coal exporter, produced 460mn tonnes in 2022.

The industry went into decline in the post-World War II period, due to competition from cheaper energy sources and increasing environmental concerns. 

Today, the UK coal industry comprises just a handful of active mines, and the UK government has announced plans to phase out coal-fired power stations by 2025. as part of its commitment to reduce carbon emissions.