THE sharp rise in the price of oil is about to bring new prosperity to Scotland’s coalmining communities.
The nation has an estimated 150m tons of easily accessible coal, but its mines fell victim to cheaper imported coal and the Thatcher government’s policy of promoting natural gas.
However, with prices rising to £50 a ton Scottish Coal, Scotland’s biggest producer, has decided to open and extend opencast mines in east Ayrshire, south Lanarkshire, the Lothians and Fife.
Industry experts are even predicting that the price is reaching the point where many of Scotland’s deep mines, which closed during the 1980s and 1990s, could again become profitable.
Planning applications have been submitted to extend the Broken Cross Muir opencast mine in south Lanarkshire, increasing production by 4.1 million tons, and to open a smaller mine near Douglas.
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Plans have also been lodged for mines at Chesters Wood East, in Midlothian, that will employ 40 people; at Headless Cross in north Lanarkshire, where 50 people will be employed; and at Nettly Burn in Fife, where 45 people will be employed.
Permission has been secured for an extension to a mine near New Cumnock in east Ayrshire where 100 jobs will be maintained and an additional 1m tons extracted.
Dacre Purchase, development director at Scottish Coal, said: “Technological advances have made it much more cost effective to get at underground coal.
“You begin with an opencast mine, but as you restore the site you leave a tunnel down to the coal seam. You can then use sophisticated machinery to chase the seam as far as it goes — maybe for a mile or more.
“This is a much easier way to mine deep coal than sinking new shafts. It is known as drift mining.”
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Only a handful of pits remained after the 1986 miners’ strike, employing 2,000 miners and producing 2m tons of coal per year. The industry now produces 6m tons per year, entirely from opencast mines, and employs 1,500 people.
Flooding closed Scotland’s last deep mine, at Longannet in Fife, in 2002.
David Hamilton, Labour MP for Midlothian and a miner for 20 years, believes that even Longannet has a future.
“The Fife area still has massive reserves of coal and the flooding could be reversed,” he said.
“We’ll never get back to the heyday of 2,000 working at a pit but you will be talking about 200 or 300 people employed and earning high wages again. Because of new technology a workforce of 200 men is equivalent to 1,500 when I was in the pit.”
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Mining communities that would benefit most are those in the Ayrshire coalfield, where unemployment has remained high since the mid-1980s when deep mines were closed.
A new course being offered in mining plant maintenance at Kilmarnock college is the first sign that the industry is making a comeback. “There is a recruitment drive going on,” said Purchase. “We need to get new blood and new skills into the industry.”
Environmentalists are less happy about a return to coal power. Duncan McLaren, chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland, said: “Coal burning is a major source of climate-changing carbon dioxide pollution.” Plans to increase extraction should be resisted until coal-fired power stations were far more efficient, he said.