A SCOTS academic has said vast coal deposits beneath the North Sea could provide a new lease of life for the energy industry.
Glasgow University professor of energy engineering Paul Younger is among a team who have calculated that there are as many as 23 trillion tonnes of coal buried around a mile beneath the seabed off the east coast of Britain.
The largest deposits are thought to be located in the North Sea off Scotland.
Prof Younger, who first developed the idea of extracting gas from these coal deposits in 2007, has co-founded a group called Five Quarter, which hopes to access the coal for the first time later this year.
He said: "We are modelling the process of deep gasification at the moment - what are the best parameters to maximise the quality of the gas and so on.
"We would be working 1000 metres down and several kilometres out to sea and it's very much at the cutting edge of what's done industrially, so we're really pioneering the technique.
"If it can be made to work, it will be a new lease of life for North Sea industries. There's a lot more coal than there ever was oil and gas. The amounts are truly staggering."
Geologists have long known that Britain's coal seams extended out to sea, but the scale was unknown and energy companies previously ignored the deposits because they were believed to be inaccessible. However, advances in technologies such as gasification - where superheated steam and oxygen are pumped underground to turn coal into gases that can be burned for power or used to make plastics - have transformed attitudes to the resource.
The Five Quarter team plan to use a rig on the coastline around Tynemouth to bore vertically for hundreds of metres, before rotating out towards the suspected coal deposits beneath the North Sea. Prof Younger said the technique would allow them to extract gases without releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
He said: "The gas that we get out would be feedstock for the chemical industry, for plants like Grangemouth.
"We are highly reliant on fossil fuel-based fertilisers in large-scale agriculture, so while I'd love to switch to organic, it simply isn't practical. People phone me up to press for decarbonisation without realising that the telephone they are calling on is made of plastics manufactured from fossil fuels.
"Unless we get on top of this, industry will go abroad and jobs will be lost, so if you can make this work, then we'd be doing the wider economy a favour as well.
"It's a significant plus for Scotland, even if we are only 10% right about it. The North Sea industry in decline but with this it would be growing again, but in a way that keeps the carbon dioxide underground."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article