By YP Letters

November 14, 2021 - A few years ago I stood by the west coast of Holderness looking across to Immingham watching a bulk carrier discharging a cargo of coal. Why should we import coal when there are millions of tonnes of top quality coal waiting to be mined in Yorkshire?

We may have been foolish enough to close nearly all of our coal-fired power stations but we still have steelworks which need coal to make steel. That is why Woodhouse Colliery, the new deep mine planned for Cumbria, is so important. Of course it has been opposed by green ‘loons’, but these people aren’t living in the real world.

The last shift at Kellingley Colliery - was Britain wrong to turn its back on coal?

Photo: Bruce Rollinson

The polyhalite mine near Whitby was also opposed and is now forging ahead. Like the proposed Woodhouse Colliery, it uses an underground conveyor belt to minimise impact.

When the last deep mine in Britain, Kellingley Colliery, was closed, its general manager said we would rue the day we closed down coal mining in Britain. From relying on reliable British coal to keep the lights on, we are now relying on a fickle mixture of wind, solar and imported gas. All this to avoid increasing CO2, which makes up 0.04 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere and to which the UK contributes less than ?one percent of the world’s total.