When Michael Gove, the levelling-up secretary, approved plans to build the Woodhouse Colliery near Whitehaven in December 2022, he said the UK would need the coal in order to carry on making steel.
But the newly revealed documents, drafted at around the same time at what was then the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), say the opposite. According to these papers, officials predict with "high certainty" that technology such as electric arc furnaces will lead to the decarbonisation of UK steel production by 2035.
"This new information blows a gaping hole in the government's case for supporting the proposed Cumbria coal mine," said Tony Bosworth of Friends of the Earth.
"When Michael Gove approved the mine 14 months ago, he claimed it was needed because there was huge uncertainty over UK steel's ability to decarbonise over the next 15 years.
"Now we discover that at the same time government officials had 'high certainty' about the industry's move away from coal."
The documents were disclosed to Friends of the Earth by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), the successor to BEIS, as part of legal action the environmental campaign group is taking against the government's climate plan.
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