From doom to de-carb

From King Coal to low carbon – David Pike paints the fresh face of northeast energy, and Nicky Conway picks out the broader path to tomorrow’s low emission regions.

Long gone are the days when ‘taking coals to Newcastle’ was used to describe acts of commercial lunacy. King Coal’s crown had been slipping even before the miners’ last stand 20 years ago. For years now the northeast has been a net importer of coal, and the trauma that attended the death of mining has largely given way to nostalgia.

But it’s as well to remember the harsh realities of that industry. Mining plundered, defaced and fouled the region’s environment. And the fossil fuel it yielded turns out to be one of the worst culprits in fuelling our greatest long-term crisis – climate change. To respond to that crisis, indeed, means more than acknowledging that King Coal is dead – it means pressing on with the revolution of creating the low carbon economy.

There’s more to that, of course, than what fuel we use. The path to low carbon living involves rethinking the whole pattern of our energy use. But isn’t it especially striking, in former coal mining regions such as the northeast (where offshore oil too is part of the legacy), to witness the emergence of a new renewables sector? Heartening, too, to see this being built on the same kind of skills and resourcefulness that once powered the industrial revolution, and sometimes even finding new uses for the infrastructure of the old energy economy.

Blyth spirit

These facilities include access to the country’s largest commercial wave machine, and three dry docks declared surplus to requirement by the port authorities. The engineers, scientists and academics who are using them in the Euro-Seas Engineering and Testing (EEST) programme are able to re-create the widest variety of coastal, sea and riverbed conditions as well as simulate currents and tides. They also have the advantage of direct access to deepwater load-out in Blyth Harbour. EEST managing director David Pridden, an offshore specialist with over 25 years’ experience in the gas and oil industries, says this gives his team “the ability to examine how subsea and marine operations will actually work in a near virtual environment,” adding: “I see Blyth as a major potential national resource in planning ahead for climate change in Britain.”

Blyth is staking a claim for another first by exploiting minewater from the former Bates Colliery to heat homes and businesses. A study carried out by the renewable energy and carbon management consultancy TNEI Services, in partnership with NaREC, has concluded that Blyth is a prime site, with water at temperature values of between 10 and 15oC sitting at just the right level in the old mines to be extracted and reused. Once a troublesome problem to the coal industry – like methane gas, another ghost from the industrial past awaiting resurrection – minewater has come a long way to start winning favourable notice as a source of sustainable clean energy.

Pipes, ports and PV

The Teesside area is keen to be seen as something of a magnet for future-oriented energy, from the hi-tech hydrogen sector espoused so energetically by Middlesborough mayor Ray Mallon [see GF40, ‘Hero Zero’] to the more down-to-earth biodiesel – used as a 5% admixture with conventional diesel to reduce both carbon dioxide and sulphur emissions from vehicles, without the need for engine conversion.

When the Biofuels Corporation chose Seal Sands in the Tees valley as the site for the world’s largest biodiesel producing complex, the £1.2 million in regional selective assistance funds secured via One NorthEast no doubt helped sweeten the deal, but Biofuels chief exec John Nicholas cites the main reasons as the “well developed chemicals infrastructure”, the fact that it has “a deepwater port on its doorstep and available storage” and, most importantly, the “wealth of skilled people living in the area”.

The £25 million Seal Sands investment will create 75 new jobs in an area of traditionally high unemployment. Should things go to plan, Biofuels has an option to develop three more production facilities. It is already talking to local farmers about growing oil seed rape to reduce the reliance of the first 250,000-tonne complex on imported palm oil.

It’s not only incomers to the region who are finding opportunities in the renewables market. Many of the 150 people who work in one successful home grown business, specialist glassmakers Romag, would probably once have followed the traditional local path into the mining or steel industries. At Leadgate in northwest Durham, less than a couple of miles from where the former steelworks at Consett belched out its legendary red dust, the sites of a cluster of former collieries ring Romag’s 120,000 sq ft factory. Ironically, the company moved there because the air quality was so good. “A clean atmosphere is essential to our production processes and this is as good as it gets,” says managing director Lyn Miles.

In May this year, Romag moved into pole position in the UK as a producer of photovoltaic laminates, unveiling its new Powerglaz product at the Royal Opera House in London before an invited audience of 150 architects. Designed and developed in conjunction with BP Solar, Powerglaz can be custom-made to replace standard glass in buildings and homes. “Instead of panels which currently have to sit on the roof, Powerglaz is a normal part of the building,”says Miles. “It could be a window, a facade or an atrium and the PV will fit into standard frames. Our alliance with BP Solar gives us added security and I would like to think that our PVs could make a significant contribution to reducing CO2 in the future. It obviously has massive potential to do this on the domestic front,” she added.

Going with the wind

It has become a commonplace that the biggest contribution to UK renewable energy in the foreseeable future will come from harnessing the wind. It’s a truism that holds true in the northeast too. The Teeswind project will become the largest urban brownfield wind farm in the world when fully developed, and a proposed offshore wind farm of 30 turbines promises enough power to supply 72,000 homes, more than the whole of Redcar and Cleveland.

“Wind power is no longer a novelty and I think this region is well placed to reap the benefits in terms of manufacturing,” says Matthew Lumsden, operations director at TNEI Services, who produced the region’s recently published Renewable Energy Strategy for the North East Regional Assembly.

That report identifies a string of suitable sites, and plans are already under way for more significant developments both offshore and on. The project for a 250-turbine wind farm at Kielder in Northumberland, once almost given up for dead in the face of flak from the Ministry of Defence, is one big scheme that’s now back on the table.

TNEI itself, which has been involved at the advisory stage in most of the wind developments in the region, has now decided to go one step further. Following a recent merger with grid installation experts IPSA, it is now reaching the final stages of a deal to bring second-hand wind turbines to the UK from Europe. Prospective developments of the magnitude of Kielder, however, are seen by many as the kind of signal the region needs to attract investors to home grown turbine manufacturing enterprises.

Does all this suggest that the northeast is shaping up as some kind of low carbon promised land – where the air is clean, rivers flow unpolluted and sustainability rules? One NorthEast would no doubt love to be able to paint that picture – of its future. But before you put your house on the market in readiness for moving there, you might reflect that promised lands are devilishly difficult to get to – and we’re still a lot closer to the point of departure than the destination. 

David Pike is a freelance writer specialising in the environment and sustainable business.

From here to ‘low carb’ may seem a hard road – but it’s one where many paths meet.

We’ve all shaken our heads ruefully over well-intentioned folk driving miles to do their recycling. Eager to ‘do their bit’, they’re actually doing more damage than good by burning all that petrol. But isn’t the same thing happening on a much larger scale? Local, regional, and national governments ‘do their bit’ via renewable energy schemes, energy efficiency initiatives and so on, while often failing to tackle the central fact that they’re driving in an energy guzzling economy to get there.

Faced with the enormity of global climate change, there’s a risk that people will ask: “Why bother?” Awful as we may feel about our carbon emissions (mankind’s main contribution to that looming nightmare), we’ll be feeling the impact for 50 years even if we reduce energy use and switch to low carbon technologies tomorrow.

That may be true as far as it goes – though our children and grandchildren might be living with our legacy for longer than 50 years. But it misses a big part of the point. Aiming for a low carbon economy – an economy that sustains our way of life with much lower energy use – may just be a good thing to do anyway. It provides a focus that helps to drive the integration of a bewildering range of initiatives. Believe it or not, it might just produce a better economy.

Finding better options, rather than running out of options, has driven our biggest system shifts before now. The Stone Age didn’t run out of stone, the steam age didn’t run out of steam – they just found something better. And, well before the oil runs out, changes in technology and behaviour could leave the oil refineries redundant. Perhaps they’ll be preserved as quaint museums, even if unpredictable extreme weather means we’ll be wearing both wellies and factor 40 when we visit them.

With UK emissions once again on the increase, however, changing to low carbon technologies and lifestyles will require big and innovative steps. It’s a scary thought for some – especially in regions where thousands of people work in industries that generate energy from fossil fuels.

Yorkshire and Humber is one such region – but if decarbing is a big deal there, it’s not one they are hiding from. Quite the contrary. The regional development agency, Yorkshire Forward, is so far the only RDA to put an emissions reduction target (20% by 2010) at the centre of its strategy. Alice Owens, its head of sustainable development, says she keeps finding that “all roads lead back to the sourcing and use of energy”. That’s because driving down the carbon is a great way of tackling a whole range of other issues.

There’s a clear link, for instance, with improved health (warm homes, reduced pollution), and with more sustainable transport and spatial planning. Reducing people’s need to travel, and boosting things like walking and cycling to work, feed back in turn into the health agenda.

The environment benefits, naturally, if we can stabilise climate change, as well as from carbon-cutting attitudes such as placing a higher value on woodland.

De-carbing revitalises the economy too. For industry and business, the low carbon route will become core to competitiveness. Energy efficiency can keep more cash in the local economy, as less of it goes on needless fuel bills. Initiatives to cut food miles not only mean that our groceries come at a lower carbon cost, but also that local producers have more opportunities in the marketplace. Growth in renewables creates jobs and market advantage – the south west is putting itself on the map for wave and tidal energy, for example. Renewables can also be part of a rural renaissance, with obvious opportunities in biomass and wind.

If there are so many win-win situations, then you might well ask what the problem is. Yet, for all the discreet actions happening, we have a long way to go. Until climate change is taken seriously, the move towards a low carbon economy will jerk and stumble forward. Investment decisions that are being made now aren’t always incorporating low carbon as a key outcome – just look at the Thames Gateway, for example. And individuals don’t connect themselves with a problem if they see it as somehow intangible, not part of their daily lives.

The existing fabric of our economy and society is firmly entrenched in carbon dependency. It needs a good hard yank.

Much of the technology we need for de-carbing is already here, and only needs support and investment from government and industry to mainstream it. But there’s a temptation to pin too many hopes on technology solving all our problems. One reason this can seem so seductive is that the other essential element of a carbon-cutting agenda – changing behaviour – is actually far more of a challenge. In reality, we can only achieve those wider sustainable development goals by changing the way we plan and build our communities, taking action at a personal level, and placing low carbon at the heart of policy making.

The east of England’s ambitious Cred project envisages cutting carbon by no less than 60% by 2025. But John Turnpenny of Cred puts that firmly in a human context. “It would be a sad world,” he says, “if carbon is reduced by 60% but everything else is the same. It is more than just about having clean fuels and engines... it is one path of sustainability.” Taking that path is one of our biggest opportunities to deliver truly sustainable communities.

7 July 2004

David Pike and Nicky Conway