Anthony Hilton: Getting all fired up for a coal-gas comeback

Before the piping ashore of North Sea gas in the 1970s, Britain used coal gas. Every town of any size had its gasometer — like the one that has been classified as a listed structure and still provides the backdrop to the Oval Cricket Ground.

The gas used to fill these now-demolished monsters came from coal that was basically cooked in a retort so that the gas and other by-products were driven off, collected and burned later.

When it arrived, natural gas was so cheap and plentiful that coal gas was uneconomic so the gasometers and coking plants that supplied the stuff gradually disappeared.

But now the idea could make a comeback with one big difference.

Coal gasification in its 21st-century form is a process whereby the coal is “cooked” where it lies underground, and only the driven-off gas comes to the surface.

There is no need for miners or any mineral extraction. You simply set fire to the coal in situ in a suitably controlled way and collect the gas which results. You get the fuel without the pollution.

Of course, it is not something you should try at home but the basic principle is something schoolkids in my day used to learn in chemistry lessons. So the science is hardly cutting edge, though the engineering is.

More to the point, the idea has been made to work on a commercial scale in various countries while in the UK its main advocate is Algy Cluff, the one-time North Sea Oil pioneer who then pursued a successful second career as a gold miner and, now in his seventies, heads AIM- listed Cluff Natural Resources.

His company yesterday announced the publication of an independently prepared, highly positive report from Biggar Economics, which highlighted just how much benefit could flow if this country seriously embraced gasification and used it to exploit our untapped coal reserves.

It reckoned that it could pull in £12.8 billion of gross value added for the UK economy, create about 7500 jobs, fuel a whole new generation of gas-fired power stations and safeguard jobs in the chemical sector by providing cheap feedstock.

Cluff believes gasification has a huge part to play in solving Britain’s energy problems and says with good reason that it is a much more attractive option than fracking.

Indeed, the Government’s enthusiasm for fracking is all the more puzzling when this is potentially a far more productive and environmentally friendly alternative.

It does not require the pumping-in of chemicals to break up the rock; it does not require constant drilling and re-drilling; it creates much less seismic disturbance than coal mining ever did, and it can be used to exploit undersea seams where subsidence would not be a problem anyway.

Cluff is actively pushing for such a project off the Firth of Forth, with a view perhaps to the gas produced not only being a fuel for the central lowlands of Scotland but also being a feedstock supplier to the Grangemouth petrochemical plant.