UK Approves First Coal Mine In 30 Years - Slashdot
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UK Approves First Coal Mine In 30 Years
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UK Approves First Coal Mine In 30 Years (washingtonpost.com) 129
Posted by BeauHD
on Thursday December 08, 2022 @02:00AM from the not-a-good-look dept.The British government has stressed that the coal taken from the mine will be used for the production of steel, rather than coal used to generate electricity, which Britain has largely weaned itself off of. [...] The new mine, which will cost an estimated 165 million pounds ($201 million), will see the majority of its coal exported to mainland Europe. The project is expected to create about 500 direct and 1,500 indirect jobs for the region of Cumbria and for Whitehaven, an ex-industrial town in the north of England that will welcome an influx of economic activity. "This coal will be used for the production of steel and would otherwise need to be imported. It will not be used for power generation," the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said in a statement. "The mine seeks to be net zero in its operations and is expected to contribute to local employment and the wider economy."
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by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Thursday December 08, 2022 @02:15AM (#63112704)
2.8 tonnes
I assumed this was a Slashdot editor typo, but the original Wapo article says the same.
Journalists should be required to pass math classes.
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by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Thursday December 08, 2022 @02:39AM (#63112730)
Or perhaps it was a reading comprehension failure. The report itself states that "[e]xcavation rates would build over a five-year period to reach a maximum coal output of approximately 2.8 million tonnes per annum."
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"Journalists should be required to pass math classes"
English classes first for our proud Sloshdit Oditurs! -
Journalists should be required to pass math classes.
Indeed, because everyone here knows that people who pass math classes never make mistakes or typos when leaving out English words. What class can we recommend for you to be less of a toxic idiot? Chemistry?
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Aren't these people the ones who claim to have layers and layers of fact-checkers and editors? Or are they just filing these stories from their pyjamas? What class can we recommend for you to stop defining competency down?
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No. Zero newspapers in the world has layers and layers. They have an editor and *some* stories go through fact checkers. Editors miss shit all the time (I mean... you've been to Slashdot right;-) ). And fact checkers typically only look into numbers where they are specifically relevant to the legitimacy of the story.
2.8 tonnes, vs 2.8 million tonnes doesn't change the story. The story here is about the coal mine being approved and using any numbers doesn't change this fact. Fact checkers will typically lo
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That is a lot of unimportant detail to prove you have Asperger's.
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Don't journals have these things called editors? Or is that just Microsoft spellcheck now?
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It's unfortunate how falsehoods are tolerated but calling people out for spreading them is now considered "toxic".
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Why just math class?
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At £165 million to build the mine that is... expensive coal.
I can buy coal retail at £600 per ton.-
So, in the first year of full operation the coal produced would generate (retail) revenues of £1.68 billion, or roughly ten times the mine construction cost. Less 500 direct jobs at ~£25k / year, in other words an ongoing cost of £12.5 million.
Obviously the mine will not be selling the coal at 'retail', but even at 10% they cover the construction costs of the mine in just one year. Every year after that their return is almost pure gravy (~£155 million).
I'm not sure what you consider
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What, is he in charge of video games?
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Apparently "Levelling Up" is a UK program for infrastructure investment draped with some vague political promises about equality. Weird terminology, I agree.
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Conservatives made a lot of gains in the last election in Northern industrial areas because the Britexers were able to channel a lot of working class disatisfaction at the status quo. Levelling up is about trying to not get wiped out at the next election by putting money in traditional Labour areas without scaring their established base too much.
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...promising small amounts of money for traditional Labour areas that like last election will be forgotten shortly after the election..
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True, which brings us to the next phase of the Tory levelling up effort: "The return to steam power!!".
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Well, that's the plan at any rate, but between Tory incompetence and the fallout of Brexit nailing just about every sector of the British economy, leveling up has become more of a sick joke than an actual policy. The fact is that successive British governments for the last two centuries have tried to "level up" the North (and Scotland), with varying degrees of success, but the Thatcherite tendency to beat the living shit out of industrial and manufacturing workers out of some sort of perverse notion of Tory
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Yay, we got rid of them forinners!
Have a nice day down the coal mine, son.-
He doesn't have time to go to the coal mine because he needs to unclog his own toilet now that all the Polish people are gone. Funny how people are upset at others stealing the jobs they don't want to do themselves.
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They seriously behave like drug addicts. "It's for steel, not energy!" "It's a special occasion, doesn't count!"
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Having a product in heavy demand and asking for the raw materials to produce said produce does not make you a drug addict. If there was a major drop in global demand for steel / coking coal *then* you may have a point.
Fossil fuel industry behaves like any commercial industry. Product demand = potential to make money with supply. No "addiction" involved.
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"Having a product in heavy demand and asking for the raw materials to produce said produce does not make you a drug addict."
True. Having a product in heavy demand and asking for the cheapest means to it, even knowing that the means is destructive to civilization as a whole, just makes you a greedy, nihilistic piece of dog shit who takes no responsibility for anything.
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Welcome to the human race!
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You're confused. The human race is something better than that, that was born on top of it and struggles to transcend it.
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The human race has never been particularly good at long term thinking. There have been a few instances throughout human history of rulers and regimes seemingly capable of planning for the long term, but generally or ape brains are absolutely terrible at assessing anything beyond immediate risk. We know when there's a tiger in the bush, when the wild fire is about to consume our homes, things that we can connect the dots quickly and see a proximal threat. But anything beyond that, we are astonishingly good a
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Sadly, you are right. It's our plight to always be running from the rustle in the grass, like our most distant ancestors, but then forget it the moment it's gone. But not totally: We remember a little, we plan a little, we advance a little. And "a little" gets bigger over time.
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I'm curious, what race or species are you using as a standard of comparison?
I don't know much about whales, dolphins, etc, but I'd say that humans are probably at least in the top five known species when it comes to long term thinking and quite possibly #1 by a large margin.
There are certainly a lot of species that lack the ability to do long term damage to their environment, but that inability is not equivalent to being good at long term thinking.
Just because the human race doesn't focus exclusively on lon
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Please name that "non-cheapest", "green" option for turning iron ore into steel that doesn't involve coal. I'll wait. Here's a hint: arc furnaces are good only for melting scrap. i.e. iron, not for reducing iron oxides into elemental iron. Coal here is a reactant in a redox reaction, not just something used for energy.
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Isn't that a question best directed to the steel industry? Maybe ask them if and why they don't have anything better.
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This is hysterical. There is no reason to think that the production of steel is destructive to civilization as a whole.
There is also no politically viable way of dispensing with steel. No country has proposed doing that, and none will.
So, the UK is going to carry on using steel. It has three alternative ways of doing this.
The first is to close down all its production and import it. Probably from China, the worlds leading emitter of CO2 and the world's leading user and producer of coal. In fact, China produces and uses more coal than the rest of the world put together, and it has no intention of stopping.
OK, moving UK steel to imports will not lower global emissions, so they might as well make it in the UK. But what about the coal? They can import the coal. Could be done, there is plenty of the right coal on world markets. But this just means consuming the same amount of coal while also incurring the costs and emissions of the transport process.
So finally you arrive at the answer they have arrived at. There is coal of the right sort in the UK, mine it and use it.
Now, you may wonder how much coal production this will add to the world's total production. That after all is the key indicator.
Global coal production is around 7.5 Gigatons a year. This mine will eventually produce 2.5 million tons a year. It will have no effect on the climate. It will not even raise UK CO2 emissions by any significant amount, and those are already down below 2% of global emissions, and falling.
There is no valid objection to this mine on grounds of climate. The objections, and the associated talk about global doom, the end of civilization etc are just a mixture of innumeracy and self indulgent hysteria.
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There's more than one way to make steel, and not all of them involve the use of coal.
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This is exactly why we are in this mess. Everybody thinks "in the long run this will absolutely not have any significant effect on CO2 emissions", but because everybody is doing it they all add up.
Putting more coal onto the market isn't going to result in no extra coal being used.
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How many are you willing to sacrifice to keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere?
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None.
I'm not willing to close my eyes to people dying far away because if stuff my country did.
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Oh, you really don't want to go down that road. I can give you a good history lesson on what your country did to the world from1700 to the late 1950s.
Nice to see that you are at least willing to pay some lip service to that question. Not that I really believe you. I'm still perfectly willing to believe you would happily sacrifice all the people in Africa, India, and most of South Asia to have your carbon zero dream.
I see no reason to continue here. Moving on.
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Indeed. That is far more relevant. However... that argues with the fundamental principles of capitalism. The goal is always to produce something the cheapest and most efficient possible way. Externalities don't come into it, that's the role of the government to regulate.
Pointing at a for profit company (companies have no conscience, so they can't really be nihilistic) for being a for profit company is stupid. The real blame here lies at the retards in the government once again selling national resources to
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"Pointing at a for profit company (companies have no conscience, so they can't really be nihilistic) for being a for profit company is stupid. The real blame here lies at the retards in the government once again selling national resources to the highest bidder at the expense of the very people they are supposed to serve."
It can be both. A corporation is indeed just a limited-purpose organization, but there are still individual people running it, and those people are psychopaths if they pretend the zero-
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To come up with a more efficient way of seperating iron from its ore or STFU. No, electric blast furnaces arn't hot enough,. they're for scrap metal only.
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Retooling a civilization takes time, bro. Can't build those electric vehicles without steel and coal!
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"Retooling a civilization takes time"...express those reservations to 1975.
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Sure you can, but if you make gears and shafts out of aluminum they have to be a lot bigger, so you would want to have per-motor direct drive.
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The rise of the automobile took roughly twenty or thirty years. When we want to, industrialized societies can move with extraordinary rapidity. There just has to be an incentivize. The miniaturization of computers came as a byproduct of such government programs as the Lunar program, which demonstrates that providing civilizations are prepared to pay for it, we can do extraordinary things and do them very quickly.
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There is actually a legal requirement to consider the emissions from anything like this, with a view to reaching net zero.
The bullshit excuse they gave was that it won't actually add any CO2 emissions. The coal would otherwise have been imported anyway. In fact, it reduces emissions because imported coal has to consider the emissions from transporting it over longer distances.
Between that and the flip flopping on on-shore wind, it's clear that this government doesn't care about the environment. Or levelling
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Exactly. There is an inherent cost to continuing with a fossil fuel-driven approach, even if it technically it's an improvement. They're being legalistic, like if fossil fuel producers were arguing the case through their lawyers rather than real people arguing from logic.
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Interested to know why this was modded overrated. These are the facts.
The government passed a law that says the minister responsible for this decision must consider the CO2 emissions cost, and must try to reduce emissions over time.
The PM has been flip flopping on on-shore wind lately. One minute it's on, them some Tories threaten to rebel and it's off again, then some others aren't happy... Sunak has been trying to avoid any confrontation by only having votes on things he knows will be broadly supported, b
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What other carbon source do you suggest?
Steel is iron and carbon, without carbon you don't have steel.-
If we were to be completely cost-neutral, the obvious answer would be CO2 from the atmosphere. But I'm not suggesting being cost-neutral, just accepting that cost is not the only proper consideration.
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It's coal, not convincing your wife/GF to try anal.
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Fossil fuels neverâ¦. Are you insane?
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Okay, I see where this is going. I'm speaking from a whole-system cost perspective, not transactional. Transactional thinking is what got us in this mess in the first place. It just hides costs while imposing them with interest on the future, not lowers them.
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Ridiculous.
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If you care to look at the long term costs, I'm going to suggest that we may very well come out of this with long term negatives. That a few generations gained a big boost, at the cost of their descendants, I'm not sure what part of that is a positive.
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...we'll be dependent on fossil fuels for quite a while, still. This is not a step back. This is making sure we're supporting our needs while we're transitioning to a new energy paradigm. Even then, coal will still be required for certain industrial processes.
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It is a step back. As it stands a lot of steel production is shifting away from coking coal. What this will do is right at a time when demand for a product is dropping it will provide more supply in the market, further driving down cost of raw materials, and further putting pressure on existing dirty means of production of steel to be extended.
Simple supply and demand dynamics show it is a step back since supply and demand regulate price points and price points are a great way of manipulating demand.
See als
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It is not a massive step back. The math indicates that is a tiny contribution. We are never going to eliminate all carbon emissions, we just need to keep them under control.
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Utterly embarrassed to have been born in UK.
We are the mockery of the world.-
No we are not. You are thinking too UK-centric and over-rating the UK's prominence in the world. We are not the centre of an empire any more, nor the centre of attention, and most people in the rest of the world don't give a toss about what the UK does and they have other things to mock or worry about. If you had been born in any other country you would have found plenty of other things there to be embarassed about, I don't want to list them here though.
Perhaps you meant you are embarassed at leaving-
Yes, you are. It's quite entertaining to see all the excuses for why the UK is better off now.
Boris 'Bumbling' Johnson and Liz 'Maggie' Truss have proven to be the comic duo of the decade and now you have Prince Decadence looking to grease his pockets.
The UK is in shambles.Correct, with the only exception being the aforementioned entertainment value.
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That sounds like the government. Of course, 1500 "indirect" jobs for the 500 jobs created, sounds even more like the government. Three government overseers to one worker.
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It must be "Gucci quality" coal...TOP STUFF
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The new mine, which will cost an estimated 165 million pounds ($201 million), will see the majority of its coal exported to mainland Europe.
"This coal will be used for the production of steel and would otherwise need to be imported."
I suppose it makes about as much sense as Brexit.
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So, as long as a company is making our stuff, we'll look the other way?
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All the UK steel producing companies have said that the coal from here has too much sulphur to be used for making steel. Also, they are all moving over to electric arc furnaces. This coal will be sold overseas for buring.
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moving over to electric arc furnaces.
Electric arc furnaces are used in mini mills [wikipedia.org] that use recycled steel and iron.
Making new steel directly from ore uses coking coal almost exclusively.
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by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08, 2022 @04:17AM (#63112828)
REF: What is the Cumbrian coalmine and why does it matter? [theguardian.com]
However, at least two UK steel-makers have ruled out using coal from the Cumbrian mine, and steel-makers across Europe are increasingly turning to low-carbon steel-making techniques, such as electric arc furnaces with energy from windfarms and other renewable sources.
That means the market for such coal is likely to be limited. The coal is also expected to be high in sulphur and therefore liable to be rejected even by steel-makers still using coal.
About 83% of the coal produced from the mine would be for export, according to estimates, which would add to global greenhouse gas emissions.
Just sayin'
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There's also either a major error in the article or it's a tempest in a thimble, even smaller than a teapot:
2.8 tons is about what my neighbour uses in his BBQ each year, I think there was a 'thousand' they left off somewhere
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Just checked, the latest figures for UK coking coal imports are just over 2 million tons a year [statista.com]. So they're completely screwed up the figures in the article, 2.8 tons is the amount that blew away as dust in that figure.
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You're correct 2.8 tons would just take a few minutes to mine.
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According to the song, "you haul 16 tons and what do ya get? Another day older and deeper in debt". So that's 16 tons a day, and so 2.8 / 16 * 12 hour day, for a depression era Kentucky coal miner, is about 2 hours and 6 minutes.
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Most European steel mills use electric arc furnaces because they are minimills.
They are (mostly) recycling steel, not making new steel from ore.
Old-fashioned integrated steel mills are money losers and make no economic sense without plenty of subsidies.
The UK has two integrated steel mills left. Neither is profitable.
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Steel is just too cheap to be worth refining at this point. The only profitable steel refinery in China (Shanghai Steel) loses money on steel but makes up for it by offering retail loans backed by cheap government loans that consumers don't have direct access to.
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I've Every major war of the 20th century was won by the country which had the largest steel production capacity. Now I'm not saying that we are still in the 20th century, and carbon fibre planes can sometimes be a substitute for steel tanks, but Russia's 19th century tactics with early 20th century equipment are killing, maiming and oppressing plenty of people in Ukraine and using lots of steel and neither Russia's mega superior airforce nor Ukraine's one are really making that much of a difference.
This is
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Cut and paste error. I've read that it's true. I can't immediately verify it on the internet now. I wonder if someone can confirm?
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Every major war of the 20th century was won by the more populous country so you need to outlaw birth control for national security.
If you found any sarcasm above, you are allowed to keep it.
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Just 2 steel-makers out of the 1,100 estimated to be in the UK. Quite a source you got there. And if its exported, who cares, just tell countries not to buy if solar/wind is cheaper alternative than coal/gas/oil.
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Basically this is the Tories dog whistling. They're sticking it to the "eco" crowd and pandering to the Daily Mail readers.
My concern is when China/India stop buying coal, what happens to this mine. SPOILER ALERT, we (the UK taxpayer) will be expected to bail out the company who built it. However the Tories don't care about that as they'll be out of power before the first milligram of coal is out of the ground.
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There is a hydrogen-based process as well for stripping the O2 from iron oxide, and another process that can use CO2 for the carbon steel. IIRC Nucor has one plant running the process now.
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Coal is quite burdensome to ship (by sea, train or truck) and is overwhelmingly used in domestic markets all over the world. I would be quite surprised if this coal was shipped anywhere outside of the UK.
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How about by sleigh and reindeer?:-)
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That's the German speaking area of Europe where Santa's little helper Knecht Ruprecht puts coals in the shoes and or stockings of naughty children.
So always remember to be naughty, and you can keep the coal furnaces running throughout winter.-
Thatâ(TM)s what he does all over the world isnâ(TM)t it? Certainly what he does in Scotland.
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Possibly an European thing with the coal instead of candy.
I always found it funny even as a kid, while of course children usually do not find much use for coal and would rather have the immediate reward of candy, coal is very useful.
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by OolimPhon ( 1120895 ) on Thursday December 08, 2022 @05:04AM (#63112882)
Umm, you do know that the purpose of coking coal isn't to heat the iron up but to provide the carbon required to turn it into steel? You can't do that with an arc. You have to have a source of carbon from somewhere. Are you suggesting that we go back to burning trees to make charcoal, which is the only way steel could be made before coal mines became common?
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by Ormy ( 1430821 ) on Thursday December 08, 2022 @05:54AM (#63112946)
You are correct about the use of coking coal in steel production. But the poster you replied to is correct that UK steel manufacturers have claimed the coal from this particular mine has too many sulphur impurities to be useful for coking.
Quick lesson on sulphur impurities in coal: coal from different mines/areas has different amounts of sulphur impurities. If you're burning the coal for electricity, the sulphur forms sulphur dioxide and then sulphuric acid (acid rain) which damages stone buildings/statues/etc (not a huge problem) and kills trees (bigger problem because CO2 levels) but the sulphur doesn't really affect the electricity generation process much. If the coal is used for coking in steel production (i.e. providing a source of carbon) the level of sulphur is a big deal, low sulphur coal makes the process much easier and is therefore preferred. The coal from this particular mine in Cumbria is very high in sulphur, so high infact that UK steel manufacturers are claiming that it can not be used for making steel. Is their claim accurate? Certainly plausible but we just don't know yet.
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Perhaps you've not heard of Steel made by not using coal [theguardian.com]
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Steel is literally iron and carbon.
You need to add carbon to ironto make steel. Coal is a good source of carbon.-
This is misleading at best. Mild steel is essentially no carbon . High carbon steel is less than 2%. Most of the carbon used in refining iron ore is used to react with the oxygen in the iron ore to make CO2 and leave iron behind.
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Iron is essentially no carbon.
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If the iron ore is heated by some other means (such as green hydrogen), yes, you'd have to add a little carbon such as pulverized coal, but the amount is very small compared to what is burned to generate the heat.
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Nope, the other economically viable process to make iron is to inject steam into burning natural gas to create CO/H2 (watergas), and then introduced into a furnace with the iron ore. The ore doesn't even melt to produce iron, thought the temperatures do have to be upwards of 800C. It's called direct reduced iron. It is the CO that reacts with the iron ore when either the watergas or coke is used, reducing it to iron and CO2. As a matter of interest, in either method the reaction occurs in gas phase. And in
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They're not going to burn met coal for power it costs WAY more than steam coal. Central App (met) coal is $197/ton Power River Basin (steam) coal is $15/ton. It's unfortunate that you have been modded 5 insightful since you don't know what you're talking about.
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They may be trying to cap it, but this coal mine won't achieve that. It's coal is not suitable for making steel.
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What does energy prices going up remotely have to do with the fact that the whole point of this new coal plant is for steel production not energy production? New steel production requires a source of carbon which this plant supposedly provides. Geez man, read the summary before inserting your typical irrelevant point.
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I think "good" is overstating it. Coking coal almost all still ends up in the atmosphere as CO2. "Excusable" would be more accurate, and only temporarily so, because it is harder to replace coking coal than thermal coal.
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from iron ore that is energy efficient is invented then coal will remain the way to do. And no an electric arc furnace doesn't work , thats only suitable for melting down scrap metal. If the CO2 wasn't released in the UK it would be released in China plus all the extra from shipping it 10K miles and we'd have no steel industry left either.
Sometimes enviromentalists need to take off the blinkers. The world isn't black and white and neither are enviromental arguments.
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They could do it without using coal - its called green steel [theguardian.com]
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I'm sorry, is it your assertion that the only source of carbon is coal? The actual amount of carbon needed to produce steel is incredibly low. Even the highest carbon ratios, found in high carbon steel, is 1%.
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of course she would but she'll advocate Green steel made using hydrogen instead of coal [theguardian.com]
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