Can some kind soul shed light on why it is necessary to pump the main shaft with "hundreds of tons of concrete" to permanently seal it off? It just seems totally unnecessary to me and incredibly short-sighted in view of the possibility that at some future time we may need to access that resource again (maybe one day a process will be devised whereby the energy in coal can be cleanly released for instance). Why burn our bridges in this way?
They have to cap the shaft to prevent sink holes and subsidence as they plan to redevelop the site. Can't have future Morrisons customers suddenly falling down a big hole in the bread aisle.
With modern technology if the need ever arose they could probably sink a new shaft as quickly as renovating the old one.
michael adams
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If we assume coal to be pure carbon (not quite accurate, I know, but a reasonable starting point), then the only obvious way of "getting the energy out" is to react it with oxygen. That produces carbon dioxide which is currently regarded as "dirty".
I sincerely doubt it could ever be possible to do anything with that carbon dioxide in way that does not in the end require more energy than was released by oxidising the coal. Pumping it back underground simply leaves potentially cast quantities of carbon dioxide that could in future leak out.
So we need to find a process that separates CO2 into something containing C, which we can burn, and O2, which we can breathe.
If that could be powered by free unlimited energy from the sun, even better. We could call it something like, erm, photo synthesis.
Owain
This Carbon Capture and Storage (CC&S) business. AFAIK, there are now no plans to pursue this. AFAIK (2), this is because, in fact, there is no such technology, is this a fair summary? People talk about how the oil industry does it, but of course they don't. They just pump it in to increase oil production without (in their application) needing to be bothered about what then happens to it.
Agreed. Also, don't forget that the workings will fairly quickly fill up with water, so that all the pit props will start corroding. Once a mine has been abandoned for any length of time, you won't be using any of the original gallery infrastructure.
On the basis we already apparently have more carbon dioxide than we want, why dig out and burn coal to make even more?
And I wouldn't have thought it safe to reopen once the pit props go and it's collapsing here and there.
LOL! I like your thinking. :-D
Morrisons
Watch this video of the Corvette Museum to see this happen. The museum is over the road from the factory, and when the factory was built, I lost 40,000 gallons of water overnight to a sinkhole. The area is full of them (well, empty, actually, but you know what I mean).
They have almost worked out how plants have been doing it for millions of years at "room temperature and pressure". Something to do with a particular molecular shape and striping electrons IIRC. Plants aren't overly effcient at it, once we can replicate the process no doubt we can also tweak it to increase effciency.
Not to mention the hydraulic pressure facturing the rocks.
Or going close to it, last thing you want is a pit full of water getting into your pit. Gleision... and that wasn't a great deal of water.
I wonder if they will quietly keep it on care and maintenace or switch the pumps off. Stopping actual production is one thing but until the pumps are switched off it doesn't take much to keep it maintained for a future production restart.
but at what price? Plants are almost free
NT
I don't know why because plants live on it.
Bill
Once it's abandoned it's gone shit-fer-brains. Mines can't be reopened unless they're continuously maintained.
It's not the CO2 that's dirty. It's the associated pollution from burning coal.
Well if they do not do this, it fills with water and eventually subsides which may cause issues above the tunnels. I'd imagine they would want to dig a new tunnel to find new seams of coal though.
I wonder how much it would cost to preserve it and keep it pumped out indefinitely? Brian
deep mines fill up with gas and water if not actively drained. Presumably this stops the gas escaping
The rare earth mines in America that closed when the chinese started dumping rare earths at uneconomic prices, took three years to pump out again to reopen.
No one keeps pumps going.
Those mines are totally uneconomic compared with strip mining elsewhere in the world.
They will be made safe and permanently closed. and good riddance. Not because I think coal or CO2 is dangerous, but because deep UK mines represent some of the mots dangerous and unhealthy conditions human beings have ever been exposed to in the workplace, and there has to be a better way to do it. And of course there is. It's called uranium.
One of the miners interviewed referred to switching them off.
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