UK High Court Revokes Permit for First Coal Mine in 30 Years

London’s High Court on Friday quashed a planning permission for the UK’s first new coal mine in three decades, ruling that the permit was unlawful as it hadn’t considered the emissions from burning the fuel. 

Earlier this year, climate campaigners, including Friends of the Earth, challenged the approval of the coal mining project.

The UK’s previous Conservative government approved in December 2022 the Woodhouse Colliery project in Whitehaven, northwest England, developed by West Cumbria Mining.  

The project to mine metallurgical coal, the one used for steelmaking, will be required to support steelmaking throughout the transition to Net Zero over the next few decades, WCM said at the end of 2023.

However, the new Labour government in the UK pulled in July its support for the project and said that it would no longer defend the case at High Court. The UK’s new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Angela Rayner, has accepted there was an “error of law” in the approval from December 2022. 

The government’s move to drop its defense of the project follows a landmark Supreme Court judgment from June 2024, which ruled that a local council unlawfully granted approval to an onshore oil drilling project as planners must have considered the emissions from the oil’s future use as fuels, in a landmark case that could upset new UK fossil fuel projects.

Today the High Court agreed with the legal challenges that the lifetime emissions of the proposed Whitehaven mine, mostly from burning coal, were not properly considered and the approval was unlawful. 

“We have to leave fossil fuels in the ground and build the cleaner, brighter future that will slash emissions, cut bills and create the well-paid jobs of tomorrow that areas like West Cumbria so urgently need,” said Niall Toru, senior lawyer at Friends of the Earth.  

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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