Downward spiral

The government insists that the UK has “considerable” coal reserves, but declines to be more precise. However, reserves are clearly nothing like what they were believed to be less than 30 years ago.

In 1980, the UK claimed “proved recoverable reserves” of 45bn tonnes to the World Energy Council (WEC). This figure has been continually revised downwards to only 0.22bn tonnes in the WEC’s last report.


But the government is committed to support what is left of an industry that 100 years ago employed more than one million people and which dug 250m tonnes of coal a year. In the past seven years, it has subsidised coal by more than