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."