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Coal chief calls for return to deep mining to fuel power-station pledge

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Published Date: 02 February 2009
By Erikka Askeland and Jane Bradley
THE head of the UK's largest coal producer has said that a return to deep mining north of the Border is essential if the Scottish Government is to follow through on its commitment to coal-fired power stations.
Don Nicolson, the new chief executive of the Scottish Resources Group, which owns several firms, including Scottish Coal, told The Scotsman that there are "perhaps billions of tonnes" of coal in Scotland that could not be accessed by surface mining.

He said: "There are millions of tonnes, perhaps billions of tonnes of coal in Scotland. A small fraction you can get at through surface mining. If coal was to become part of our long-term future, which we think it will, then you need to go deep. That is where the bulk of the coal reserves are."

UK Coal has five deep mining sites – all in England. Scotland's last remaining deep mine, at Longannet, Fife, was closed in 2002. The Scottish Government plans to base the future of electricity supply on "clean" fossil-fuel power stations and renewables – and has said it will not build any more nuclear power stations north of the Border.

But it has come under fire from energy experts who have claimed that new coal-fired plants should not be built until a new technology – which does not yet exist – to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions is available.

Carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations accounts for almost 20 per cent of Scotland's emissions. Scotland has a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 to help prevent catastrophic climate change.

Nicolson admitted that a new deep mine could be some time off, refusing to comment on expectations that any new plant would open in Canonbie, Dumfriesshire, but added that coal mining could prove lucrative in the future, when commodity prices rebound.

Coal has dramatically dropped in price over the past six months, but Nicolson said he expects it to return to the $60 to $80 levels previously enjoyed by the industry. In August, the price was as high as $190 a tonne.

He said: "There are very high costs to set up, sinking shafts and all you have got to do. You need two things for this to happen. One, you need government's long-term commitment to coal because it will take a long time to get the coal out to get your money back. The second thing is commodity prices need to be high for a long period."

He added: "Coal prices today are pretty close to the bottom of the cycle. My view is once the world economy picks up, whether that takes one or two or three years, commodity prices will follow."

• Rio Tinto is in talks to raise up to $9 billion (£6.2bn) from Chinalco, the state-owned Chinese aluminium firm which already holds an 11 per cent stake in the miner, reports claimed yesterday.

The capital injection was intended to address growing concerns about the company's debt, it was reported, adding that the Chinese company was planning to buy minority stakes in Rio's mining assets.

It is understood that Chinalco was also considering increasing its stake in Rio to at least 15 per cent, which could be done through a placing to raise about $1bn.


Page 1 of 1

  • Last Updated: 01 February 2009 8:47 PM
  • Source: The Scotsman
  • Location: Edinburgh
 
1

The Strategist,

02/02/2009 00:33:21
The technology to capture CO2 does exist!!!!!!!!!!!!
2

silent majority,

edinburgh 02/02/2009 07:51:35
#2 and 3.
Yep, there are a huge number of us "retired" colliery people who remember that the Canonbie reserves were the saviour of the NCB in Scotland and can you recall the "Plan for Coal" too?
Those of us who were made redundant because of so called "uneconomic" pits are now mirthlesly laughing at the irony of it all......
3

silent majority,

edinburgh 02/02/2009 07:55:47
and...absolutely no chance of anyone who was there before going back down the pits in Scotland now. The youngest of us have found new jobs and are at least 50 years old.
4

greenhill,

02/02/2009 09:03:41
RE The Strategist,02/02/2009 00:33:21

That is a disengenuous statement.Effective carbon capture does not exist yet.The fact is that coal causes smog, acid rain, global warming and air toxins.

In addition coal burning has produced more than 100 times more radioactivity than all the nuclear power plants in the world. Air pollution from coal burning kills hundreds of thousands of people per year. If nuclear was as bad as that all nuclear plants would be closed.

Mass opinion is deluded in failing to see that conventional power is the real bogeyman.
5

nabodican,

Rural Scotland 02/02/2009 12:48:18
It is only common sense to bring back deep mining as we often been told that there are two or three hundred years worth of coal that could be mined.
In some of the posts above, all we see are anti Maggie rants and the assumption that the old technology would still be used.
Personally, I think Maggie was one of the best prime ministers we ever had, and was certainly streets ahead of the present bunch.
I would imagine that we would now adopt some of the modern tunnel boring methods to extract coal and with suitable treatment of the exhaust gases there would be very little air pollution.
Any alleged effect on the climate will have nothing to do with it.
6

nabodican,

Rural Scotland 02/02/2009 12:49:27
Rab - You are a plonker and your poetry sucks, better stick to your day job.
7

silent majority,

edinburgh 02/02/2009 15:29:56
Nabodican

I suspect you have no idea what you are talking about. "Modern tunnel boring methods" - what? Deep-mined coal exists in seams, usually many hundreds of feet below ground level. There are major engineering problems associated with its extraction - shaft sinking, ventilation, control of gas, ground support, water ingress and the delivery of the coal from its point of extraction to the surface and, of course, the problems of delivering men to and from their workplace safely.
I'm afraid that our knowledge and experience of doing such things was destroyed - yes, by Thatcher and her acolytes in the mad "dash-for-gas". The best PM ever? She effectively destroyed our industrial base as an act of political revenge and there is no way back.
8

Greenheatman,

TAIN 02/02/2009 19:06:46
I why not contact you MSP and suggest Gentec wats as an alternative to heating water by burning 80% dirty coal 20% clean coal - mostly from Poland.
Andrew Mackay, from Greenheat Systems Ltd., Tain, Scotland, submitted a proposal to the Severn Tidal Review to 're-engineer' the Shoots' Barrage so that the electricity would be used to heat up thermal stores on land, which could then provide steam for local steam raising power plants - so they did not need to burn fossil fuels. He claims this would produce over 3TWh of secure base load, and or peak shaved, and/or load following electricity annually. In addition, more than 1.6 billion tonnes of desalinated water would be produced as a by-product from the thermal generating process. As Climate change bites and fresh water becomes more scarce in summer, that could be very valuable.

However his idea was ruled to 'exceeded the remit' of the review exercise and was not followed up further. Neither was his even more ambitious idea suggesting how all 400TWh of the UK's electricity could be generated by converting existing thermal power stations to raise steam from marine wave and tidal resources. He had developed this initially in the context of Scotland’s energy requirements.

His patented Gentec WATS System aimed to generate all of Scotland's electricity from a combination of wave and tidal stream energy. He explains that

'About 98% of the kinetic energy captured is from wave power using mobile Combined Harvester Vessels (CHVs). The remaining 2% will come from tidal stream or estuarine river flows in the unlikely event of flat calm prevailing in the North Atlantic for several days at a time. The captains of these fully crewed steam driven vessels will seek out the largest waves in the North Atlantic or the North Sea. The kinetic energy contained in the waves is converted to heat and stored as green heat in large thermal accumulators on board these vessels. When these thermal accumulators are fully 'charged up with
9

Greenheatman,

TAIN 02/02/2009 19:08:37
cont.... When these thermal accumulators are fully 'charged up with heat', the CHVs simply head for port to discharge their valuable cargoes of heat at their bespoke berths. The heat is transferred from the vessel using simple proven heat exchanging techniques to the turbine house's much larger thermal accumulator. The use of expensive and vulnerable sub-sea cables to bring renewable energy ashore is no longer necessary. The onshore hub power station generates synchronous base load, load following or peak shaving electricity continuously, from storage, using standard off-the-shelf steam turbines irrespective of the sea state and tides. The shore side power station is designed to operate for five to seven days at full capacity without any 'topping up' from the CHVs.'

He noted that the Scottish Government has proposed a huge coal fired power station, with some carbon sequestration, at Hunterston on the North Ayrshire coast - close to the Hunterston B nuclear power station. The basic plan is to import the coal via the deepwater berths at Hunterston. He says his system would be better. His renewable heat source could be used to run the existing 1288MW rated generators already operating at Hunterston B. 'Only the nuclear heat source needs to be decommissioned over time.'

He comments wryly 'the concept of shipping in heat in the form of unburned coal, to Hunterston, to raise steam in a proposed coal fired power station is well understood, yet shipping in wave and tidal renewable heat, as heat, to the same berths at Hunterston is beyond comprehension of most.' and adds ’this proposal will be a lot cheaper than developing existing renewables further because no sub-sea cables are required and the heat can be shipped into other existing power stations like Longannet, Cockenzie and Torness where existing generating plant can be used as coal and nuclear heat sources are phased out over the next five to ten years.'

He calculates that the one-off cost of converting the
10

Greenheatman,

TAIN 02/02/2009 19:09:49
He calculates that the one-off cost of converting the 1288MW Hunterston B nuclear power station into a 100% renewable energy power station capable of generating 11.3TWh of pure synchronous green electricity is put at £400 million. This figure includes the construction of the bespoke berth and two steam driven CHVs. The primary 'fuel' used to run the converted power station and operate the CHVs is from waves and tidal stream so carbon emissions can be put at zero.'

By comparison a modern supercritical 1288MW coal plant, with the ability to sequestrate about a fifth of the carbon emitted, on the other hand, will cost upwards of £1,000 million to build. The annual cost of 5.47million tonnes of coal, assuming it remains at £300 per tonne, is a staggering £1.6 billion in fiscal terms. The cost to the planet in terms of CO2 emissions, assuming the carbon sequestration works, will be £8.3million tonnes. The additional cost of generating unit of electricity (1kWh) from this new generation of coal fired power stations, based on the wholesale purchase price of the coal being £300/tonne is 15 pence. The cost price may well quadruple when marine renewables are added into the 'energy mix' as currently proposed.'- since he sees the conventional approach as futile given the variabilty of the marine energy sources, and indeed on land wind, which his system replaces. He says that we need to distinguish between random and intermittent bursts of electricity and secure base load electricity that Gentec WATS will supply. In simple non-technical language, the electricity from conventional wind and marine turbines is the WRONG kind of electricity demanded by modern society; the electricity that will flow from a Gentec WATS thermal power station is the RIGHT kind of electricity.'

And he concludes 'If Gentec WATS was rolled out across Scotland so that Cockenzie (1200MW), Longannet (2400MW) and Torness (1200MW) were modified simultaneously with Hunterston B in a similar way, then Sco
11

Greenheatman,

TAIN 02/02/2009 19:10:31


And he concludes 'If Gentec WATS was rolled out across Scotland so that Cockenzie (1200MW), Longannet (2400MW) and Torness (1200MW) were modified simultaneously with Hunterston B in a similar way, then Scotland could generate 53.3TWh of very cheap green electricity annually for a capital outlay of under £2 billion. This figure, 53.3TWh, represents around 1/8 of the electricity consumed in the UK annually and will make fuel poverty a thing of the past.'

We don't have details of exactly how his wave energy collector system would work, or of his earlier idea for his tidal stream invention, Gentec venturi, but he insists that all his systems’ components follow all the Laws of Physics, are already in use and well proven. He has simply ‘rearranged’ these to give firm power from renewable energy sources for the first time and is confident that it will stand the most rigorous scientific scrutiny. So it’s a pity no one seems to be listening.
12

Andrew Service,

Inverclyde 02/02/2009 20:12:12
Yet again our blundering "leaders" sit in their ivory towers pontificating about the lovely windmills and green energy while in the real world we are almost wholly dependent on outside sources for our energy needs and green energy has no chance of filling that gap when we end up low on our own supplies.

If we are to sustain our present infrastructure and economy we NEED to use nuclear at least to make up as one of the big contributors of energy; what other option do we have?
13

FerryPort,

02/02/2009 22:07:08
This is an interesting altrenative
Cheers!
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/scottish-power-station-be-powered-few-big-drams

 

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