Decisions

As I understand it, in order to produce new, virgin iron from iron ore you need to burn a lot of coal in the form of coke in a blast furnace - while to produce new iron from old iron you can use an electric arc furnace. Some people think that for a serious country to rely of electric arc alone leaves it rather exposed.

For the time being at least, plenty of iron around the world is made using high grade black coal - as opposed to the low grade brown coal used mainly for power generation. But here in the UK, we look to be closing down our last few blast furnaces.

And a judge took the eco-road and reversed the last government's decision to allow the West Cumbria coal mine to go ahead. Leaving aside the question of whether it is right to open another coal mine, I am not very happy with the way that judges and lawyers are muscling in on decisions of this sort. That is what we have governments for and there ought to be a better way.

Then I read yesterday at reference 2 of an Australian company which want to develop a big open-cast coal mine in southern Alberta, with the resultant coal mainly destined for steel plants in India and China. An open-cast coal mine which appears to involve chopping the top off a few square miles of mountain. A project which looks to be taking maybe a decade to get underway for maybe 25 years of operating life.

Canada gets most of the jobs and the damage to its wilderness (Rocky mountain) environment. India and China get the coal. And Australia gets the profits - which is presumably fair enough as they took the gamble of buying up the land involved.

Just as here in the UK, environment is important, with lots of documentation about same being provided at reference 5. From where I get to reference 6. Which turns out, at the beginning anyway, to be rather tutorial and one can learn a lot about coal mining in general. I have yet to download Volume 2 which will contain, inter alia, the aboriginal (not First?) peoples' consultations. It seems that there are rather a lot of them with a stake in this business - a problem which has evolved  here in the UK to the rather more tractable special interests of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

Reference 7 is about geology. It seems that for a project of this sort you find out a lot more about your site than could have been the case in the glory days of coal mining here in the UK. Lots and lots of bore holes.

Given that in any foreseeable green world we are still going to need steel, and that we are going to need plenty of steel to get there - not least for windmills, nuclear power stations and (now) tanks - not an easy call. Whatever the woolly hat brigade might think.

References

Reference 1: https://www.westcumbriamining.com/.

Reference 2: Australia’s richest woman wins vote for controversial Canadian coal mine: Mining magnate Gina Rinehart spent millions promoting project despite a ruling that it was ‘not in the public interest’ - Ilya Gridneff, Jamie Smyth, Financial Times - 2024. 

Reference 3: https://www.alberta.ca/.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grassy_Mountain_Coal_Project.

Reference 5: https://open.alberta.ca/publications/environmental-assessment-benga-grassy-mountain-coal-eia. Environmental Assessment - Benga Mining Limited Grassy Mountain Coal project - Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and application for approval

Reference 6: Environmental Assessment - Benga Mining Limited Grassy Mountain Coal project - Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and application for approval: Volume 1: Cover letter, Master Table of Contents, Sections A - F. A little over 1,000 pages of pdf. Near 140Mb of it - a document which BT Broadband, to its credit, gets down to my laptop fast enough.

Reference 7: https://iaac-aeic.gc.ca/050/documents/p80101/115589E.pdf. Benga Mining Limited:  Grassy Mountain Coal Project: Section B: Geology and Geotechnical - Riversdale Resources - 2016. The source of the snaps above.