After a Welsh council rejected plans to dig for 85,000 tons of coal, the UK has no outstanding proposals for coal mining anywhere in the country.
Carmarthenshire council turned down the second application for expanding the open-pit Glan Lash mine near Llandybie in Wales, citing impacts on the local environment.
Bryn Bach Coal Ltd. had wanted to extend the site over 10.3 hectares, but the council found that doing so would imperil habitat and species, including one of the UK’s rarest butterflies.
The Glan Lash mine opened in 2012 on a plan to excavate 92,500 tons over 4-and-a-half years.
Because of the technical challenges and upfront capital involved in building a mine—of any kind—developers often opt to start small and concentrate their footprint around the richest targets in the deposit.
Companies will then often fund expansions with the revenue from the first stage of mining, but Bryn Bach’s first proposal was rejected in 2019, and this latest rebuff is the second.
In a decision notice, Rhodri Griffiths, the council’s head of place and sustainability, listed nearby protected woodland and hedgerows as habitat that would be threatened by the coal mine, as well as “the unacceptable disturbance, degradation and loss” of “irreplaceable peatland.”
Llandybie also hosts a population of the marsh fritillary, one of the UK’s most threatened butterfly species.
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In their planning application, Bryn Bach presented that the coal the company was mining is non-thermal, meaning demand didn’t come from power plants but from manufacturing, including water filtration systems and battery production. It will have 6 months to appeal the decision.
BBC quoted Coal Action Network as saying there were now “no live applications for new coal mines” in the UK and that the decision reflected “a clear, strategic commitment to climate leadership, rare habitat protection, and safeguarding the health of surrounding communities.”
The largest open-pit coal mine in the UK was also in Wales, and it too has been setback—potentially forever—by a rejection of an expansion proposal. There is now just one underground coal mine left in Wales.
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