Can Britain mine coal while it’s going green? It’s complicated.

Along England’s northwest coast, the Haig coal mine for 70 years supplied the local economy around Whitehaven with jobs until it closed in the 1980s. Its muscular winding engine, which used to haul the coal and several thousand workers up from the depths, still towers over the site, a relic of this proud but also danger-filled past.

Now, many people in the region have a surprising hope: that the phrase “bygone era” will prove premature.

They see Whitehaven as a promising site for a new coal mine, even though the world is entering an era focused on how to steer toward zero carbon emissions.

The company West Cumbria Mining has been pitching its idea for several years now. But in recent weeks the proposal has escalated into a national controversy, as clean-economy advocates seek to quash the planned mine amid Britain’s preparations to host this year’s United Nations conference on global warming. 

The underlying question is, can you be serious about responding to climate change and also approve a new coal mine?

“Unfortunately, when you mention the word ‘coal,’ people form an impression right away,” says Mike Starkie, mayor of Copeland, the Cumbrian district set to host the proposed mine, and an ardent supporter of the project. “But there are different kinds.”

Coal’s role in steelmaking

Beneath the seabed near Whitehaven lie deposits of the kind of high-quality coal that currently plays a vital role in most steelmaking. Advocates for the project say Britain currently imports this kind of metallurgical or “coking” coal from other continents, and that demand for steel will grow in part because of the need for structures like wind turbines for a greener future economy.

Foes of the project argue that none of this justifies an investment in a form of energy that should be phased out, and which will do relatively little for job creation in the Cumbria region.

“For a coal mine to be worth the investment, you’re talking about a long-term future,” says Bob Ward, policy director of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, a collaboration between the University of Leeds and the London School of Economics and Political Science. And although coking coal will still be relied on for some time to produce chemical reactions in steelmaking, he views its demise as all but inevitable.

“The pressure on the steel industry to [become greener] is so intense, that while we’re not there yet, everybody’s racing to get there,” Mr. Ward says.

Approving a coal mine “looks terrible”

Indeed, of all the fossil fuels, coal is regarded as the dirtiest, and Britain was one of the founding members of the Powering Past Coal Alliance, a body dedicated to eradicating its use in energy generation. 

The British government announced in March that it was launching a public inquiry into the proposed mine that would be the country’s first new deep coal mine in more than three decades.

Days later, the government published a review of Britain’s role in the world, in which Prime Minister Boris Johnson stated that tackling climate change and biodiversity loss would be “the U.K.’s foremost international priority.” 

This comes as Britain is just a few months away from the latest U.N. conference of parties on climate change, COP26, to be hosted in Glasgow, Scotland.

“If the U.K. wants to be seen as a climate champion,” says Andrew Grant, head of climate, energy, and industry research at Carbon Tracker, a London-based think tank, “for it to be sanctioning a coal mine in the year when it’s hosting COP looks terrible.”

The mine’s backers in Cumbria – who have received approval on three different occasions, only to have it rescinded each time so far – argue the situation is more complex.

In the realm of electric power, myriad forms of renewable energy are pushing coal-fueled power generation toward extinction. Yet in steel production, they say, the primary candidate to replace coking coal, a process that uses hydrogen, is still in its developmental stages.

A debate over jobs

The issue’s politics go beyond questions of clean energy. In Britain’s recent general election, the Conservatives boosted their majority in no small part by wresting a swath of northern constituencies from their main opposition, Labour. In an effort to retain this newfound support, the government has been promoting its “leveling-up” agenda, lavishing more attention and resources on these parts of the country that have long lagged behind London and areas of southern England.

Many Conservative parliamentary representatives of northern seats are supporting the mine, pointing to the 500 jobs it is slated to create directly, plus more than 1,500 jobs its developers predict will be created through the local supply chain. 

Mayor Starkie, also a Conservative, cites such numbers as evidence that the project will “really help us drive the local economy forward.” He says that every member of the Copeland borough council, whether Labour or Conservative, supports the mine.

“When people look at Cumbria as a county,” says Karen Mitchell, CEO of Cumbria Action for Sustainability (CAFS), “they think of the Lake District national park, a very beautiful area, but they don’t realize we have pockets of very serious deprivation.”

“I really feel for the people in West Cumbria because they just want jobs, and I understand that,” continues Ms. Mitchell, “and the councils are driven by the same.” 

But with concerns over the sustainability of the jobs that would come with the mine, as demand for its wares diminishes in the expected transition to “green steel,” some wonder whether it would make more sense to direct resources into supporting green jobs. A recent report commissioned by CAFS suggests that Cumbria has the potential to create 9,000 green jobs over the next 15 years.

“We do have huge potential for green energy,” says Julian Whittle, business engagement manager at the Cumbria Chamber of Commerce. And while businesses in towns near to the proposed development, such as Whitehaven and Workington, are “certainly positive” about the mine, Mr. Whittle says the picture is a little different further afield in Cumbria.

“The alternative view, which a lot of businesses outside of West Cumbria itself may hold, particularly those in the hospitality and tourism sectors, in the Lake District for example,” says Mr. Whittle, “is that they would look askance at this, thinking it’s tarnishing our green and pleasant image.”

As debate over the mine enters what may be a pivotal phase, some supporters of the mine put one other argument forward: that the Cumbrian site could be a test bed of how to mine coking coal sustainably, perhaps by linking its use to the implementation of carbon capture and storage techniques in an effort to make steelmaking emission-free.

Yet in the end, as the U.N. conference in November comes increasingly into view, the fact that the Cumbrian mine would be producing coal for steelmaking, rather than for power generation, may prove too much of a nuance to save it.