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Mineral extraction is essential to our way of life. From coal to clay, iron ore to aggregates, life would not be the same without the materials we extract from beneath our feet for the everyday products upon which we all depend. At the same time, mining and quarrying projects are often maligned for perceived environmental disadvantages. The reality is far different from the rhetoric, often borne on fear and uncertainty. Like it or lump it, coal will remain the main fuel for world electricity production with international trade steadily increasing in the early decades of the new millennium. Despite a long history of coal extraction in the UK, there are sufficient reserves to last long after our offshore oil and gas resources have been exhausted. To harness that valuable resource, we need to pool our skills and experience in both the production and use of a fuel, which can serve us for generations to come. Britain today has 17 major deep mines producing over 20 million tonnes of coal a year. Surface mines produce another 13 million tonnes - an industry with a total turnover in excess of one billion pounds and providing direct and indirect employment for some 40,000 people. The UK's deep mines are the safest and most efficient in Europe - three times more efficient than Germany's coal industry which has been receiving over three billion pounds of state aid in recent years. Deep mine coal producers have developed a systematic approach to environmental risks and sets up procedures to prevent pollution, for both normal and emergency situations. Surface coal mining remains the most emotive issue; yet it is by no means the ogre it is often made out to be. Most surface mines hold regular liaison committee meetings that allow members of the public to raise concerns they have about site operations. All complaints are investigated as part of a programme of continued improvement. Arguably the most regulated of the mineral extraction activities, the coal industry has a track record of compliance second to none, and has done more than any other industry to remediate land bearing the scars of an industrial past. Britain's coal producers each year return hundreds of acres of 'old' land to new use. Many of the UK's current surface mine operations involve working sites with ground contaminated by historic industrial activities being clean up as part of the mining project - at no cost to the tax or ratepayer. Independent certification from external consultants is often sought to verify the standard of clean up at sites. Scientific analysis services are provided by independent laboratories with NAMAS accreditation. In 1999, RJB Mining, Britain's biggest coal producer, won Durham County Council's top award for the restoration of Rainton Meadows, a site which is now the headquarters of the Durham Wildlife Trust. The Banks Group was awarded a Tidy Britain Group Millennium Marque for restoration work at its Oakenshaw site in County Durham, while RJB were named as one of the top environmentally aware companies throughout Yorkshire. Coal Producers have consistently sought to work co-operatively with planning authorities to harness the nation's energy resources in a positive and environmentally acceptable way. Yet all too often, the hard work of council officers and planning officials has been ignored, their carefully considered recommendations for approval rejected on an altar of political bias, applications pre-judged irrespective of their planning merits. It is in coal consumption the Britain has an opportunity to become a global shop window for new technology. While most of the UK's coal burning power stations are utilising basic technology developed almost half a century ago, it has funded a research programme which has nurtured an exciting range of new technologies which burn coal more efficiently, with substantial reductions in the gasses which the burning of any fossil fuel inevitably creates. The coal industry believes that the time is now right for the government to kick-start investment in those new technologies, particularly as oil prices have trebled in little over a year, gas prices doubled in the space of 12 months, and our aging fleet of Magnox nuclear stations are to be phased out. World coal consumption will inevitably increase. Many countries have no alternative but to burn coal. We should encourage them by example to burn coal more cleanly and efficiently by building our own demonstration plant here in the UK. It wouldn't cost the earth, but it could help save it.
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