TUC/CBI/CARBON /TRUST CONFERENCE, 28 FEBRUARY 2006, CONGRESS HOUSE

Find below the contents of a speech made by Steve Kemp, NUM National Secretary to the TUC/CBI Conference in London today 28 February 2006

Chairman:
In addressing the question of climate change and energy, I have noted the comments of Sir David King and I would like to begin my contribution with one of the more important points he has made several times already:
China.

As you would expect with a union with a 120 year history we try to keep in touch with other miners around the world. China is producing 2.1 billion tonnes of coal a year ? 10 times as much as the UK did at its peak in 1913. This will rise to 2.4 billion tonnes in 4 years, when it comes to the climate, that has some impact!

That is why the European Union is funding a clean coal programme in China and why China intends to build its first zero emissions coal fired plant within 15 years. The Chinese are not sitting around when it comes to clean coal technology. They know they have a problem.

Less well known is the fact that 6,000 miners are being killed every year in Chinese mines. As a union we are looking at how we might help them get that fatal accident rate down.

The safety and health of miners and the environmental degradation in coal mining communities are linked together, always have been.

A safer, more productive industry is a cleaner industry. A cleaner, more mechanised industry provides energy more efficiently and does less environmental damage. It is a package.

The EU and the UK should see the linkage here, too. Help us ? and we say this to the CBI members, too ? to get the accident rate down in China. You can sell safety technology and clean coal technology to China. You know that, because your members are already doing it. But don?t forget the UK.

Let me put a few points forward here for our situation:

First, we need to find a way to incentivise cleaner technologies, lower carbon energy or the deep mines will die and Britain will lose access to its coal resource.

This will need to be sorted out at the EU level, too, because of the rules on state aids.

Second, like the Chinese we should be using supercritical boilers ? they have 80% of the worlds? supercritical boilers; and we don?t have a single one ? even though they are designed here. They can cut CO2 emissions by 20% or more.

Third, we should be investing in clean coal power stations like the IGCC ? Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle - or other processes. These can be built next to the pithead ? like the proposal to revive the mothballed Hatfield colliery, instead of leaving the mine in mothballs.

Where pits are close to pipeline networks, then as the technology is proven, carbon capture and storage techniques can pump CO2 into disused North Sea oil and gas wells.

Fourth, instead of relying on imported fuels, we should be using our own coal. There may be only 6 large deep mines still producing, but they do have extensive reserves and there are millions more tonnes of reserves that could be developed, not just in the three mothballed deep mines. There are untouched reserves as well.

Fifth, there needs to be recognition that the market will not deliver security of energy supply by itself. It has not done so. It does not think strategically.

There needs to be a clearer mechanism in the UK that ensures that we do not so easily abandon our energy resources as we have in the past.

Secure our energy, clean up our act and do it efficiently and work internationally. That?s our message.