According to Jack Moore writing in the International Business Times, huge coal deposits have been indicated by exploration under the North Sea. Data from North Sea oil and gas exploration has been used to build a picture of the large coal deposits that could power Britain for centuries. “We think there are between three trillion and 23 trillion tonnes of coal buried under the North Sea,” Dermot Roddy, former professor of energy at Newcastle University, told the Sunday Times. This news comes as UK Coal is planning to close two of the nation’s last three deep pit mines. The coal miner went into administration last year after struggling to manage rising costs. It has started redundancy talks at its Thoresby (Nottinghamshire) and Kellingley (Yorkshire) mines.

Roddy says the resources under the North Sea are “thousands of times greater than all the oil and gas we have taken out so far, which totals around 6,000 Mt. If we could extract just a few percent of that coal it would be enough to power the UK for decades or centuries.” 

Geologists are yet to discover the scale of the coal deposits, despite already knowing that Britain’s coal resources stretched out into the North Sea. The picture shows Saltom pit, which was England’s first undersea coal mine, situated approximately 1 km to the south of Whitehaven Harbour, on the west coast of Cumbria.

Roddy is to reveal plans to sink the first boreholes by the end of 2014 at a Royal Academy of Engineering conference.

Professor of petroleum exploration at Imperial College London Richard Selley said that such discoveries of unconvential energy stores were “game-changers.

“A decade ago the talk was all about peak oil and gas but that has gone out of the window,” he said. “The big game-changer is seismic imaging, which has become so sensitive that we can now pinpoint the ‘sweet spots’ where shale gas, oil and coal are to be found.

“There have also been huge improvements in horizontal drilling . . . and in hydraulic fracturing [fracking], which lets us get the gas and oil out of rock. If we put aside the green issues, then in perhaps 10 years we could be self-sufficient in gas and possibly oil too.”

Energy companies previously deemed such stores inaccessible but technological advances such as gasification have allowed underground pumps to turn the coal into gas useful for power-generation.