The last deep coal mine in Britain is an arresting sight – a sprawling tangle of towers, conveyor belts, processing sheds, railway lines and “muck heaps”, as its mountains of grey-black slag are known in Yorkshire. It is called “the Big K”, and with reason. Kellingley is one of Europe’s largest mines, producing two million tonnes of coal a year. It sits on tens of millions of tonnes of reserves. Its two shafts descend 2,600 feet beneath the surface, and so much coal has been extracted since it opened in 1965 that from the bottom of those shafts miners must now travel six miles, on small battery-powered trains and then conveyor belts, to reach the face. There they labour round the clock, in intense humidity and temperatures that reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
Each day, Kellingley despatches three or four trainloads of coal 12 miles to Drax, which is Britain’s biggest coal-fired power station and generates about 7 per cent of the UK’s electricity. For decades Kellingley also supplied huge amounts of coal to Ferrybridge power station, just three miles away in West Yorkshire. It has, in short, helped to keep the country lit and heated – but not for much longer.
Drax has converted three of its six generators to biomass, importing six million tonnes of wood pellets from North America each year to run them, and plans to convert a fourth. In recent years Ferrybridge has increasingly used imported coal, which is cleaner and cheaper than Kellingley’s despite being shipped several thousand miles. In any case, Ferrybridge is closing next year as part of a government drive to shut down all of Britain’s 12 remaining coal-fired power stations within 15 years and halve greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025.
