The History of Mine Water Remediation by the Coal Authority
The Coal Authority is a Non-Departmental Public Body (NDPB) established by Parliament. Its statutory duties are set out in the Coal Industry Act 1994. Certain property rights and obligations were transferred to the Authority when it became operational on 31st October 1994 including ownership of coal and mines of coal previously vested in British Coal Corporation.
Although there was no statutory obligation on the Authority with regard to minewater pollution, it was soon apparent that this would be one of the key issues with which it would be involved, given the scale of the coal mine closure programme in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
The Authority inherited a number of existing operations from British Coal where minewater pumping took place to control rising minewater and prevent future uncontrolled discharges. These consisted of nine pumping stations in County Durham (none of which had treatment systems due to the relatively good quality of the pumped waters), one in Yorkshire and one in Staffordshire.
The Authority continued to operate these stations, but initially there was no clear information or basis on which the problem could be tackled in a logical manner.
The First Steps to Treating Mine Water Discharge
The minewater pumping stations inherited from British Coal had originally been operated to prevent water from migrating to deeper operational mines which had been closed in the run-down of the industry in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. In the Durham coalfield (North East of England), British Coal had proposed to switch off the pumps at the 9 pumping stations in the region and allow the minewater to recover, predicting that the waters would eventually discharge, without problem, to the North Sea through a number of ‘beach adits’.
Concerns were raised by a number of parties including the National Rivers Authority (predecessor of the Environment Agency) and District and County Councils that British Coal’s predictions were erroneous which resulted in the pumping operation continuing. Concerns were also raised regarding the legal position since, under Section 89(3) of the Water Resources Act 1991 as originally enacted, a person is not guilty of the offence of causing or knowingly permitting the pollution of controlled waters if he is merely ‘permitting’ a discharge from an abandoned mine.
These concerns were voiced in Parliament in debates during the lead up to privatisation of the coal industry in 1994, which resulted in the Government’s expectations of the Authority in this area being set out by Lord Strathclyde:
"The Government will expect it (the Authority) to go beyond the minimum standards of environmental responsibility which are set by it’s legal duties in these areas and to seek the best environmental result which can be secured from the use of theresources available to it for these purposes."
Fortunately, the region is well blessed with monitoring points in the form of unfilled shafts which would be key in the next few years in enabling recovery to take place in a controlled manner. Unfortunately, this was not the case in most other coalfields where little or no monitoring of the recovery position was possible as all shafts had been filled as part of the closure programme.
The Developing Legal Framework
Considerable legal changes have taken place since 1994 in respect to minewater pollution in the UK. As detailed above, no statutory liability arose for merely 'permitting' water to discharge from an abandoned mine. This was changed in 1999, but only for mines abandoned after 31st December 1999. This would only apply to the few mines remaining after that date which may close at some time in the future.
In addition new Regulations were brought in which required operators to give at least 6 months notice of any proposed 'abandonment' to the Environment Agency. This was intended to allow time to consider the likely impacts of closure and to seek to ensure appropriate measures could be put in place to deal with anticipated occurrences.
Perhaps the biggest change was the introduction of the European Water Framework Directive, which is currently being transposed into UK law. The Directive is the most significant piece of legislation relating to the water environment for many decades. It is 'all encompassing' in nature and requires that all bodies of water in the EU shall be of 'good ecological quality' by 2015. Clearly waters impacted by minewater do not generally meet this requirement and therefore the objective must be to seek to treat those discharges which lead to non-compliance within the timescale laid down. A further requirement of the Directive is no degradation of watercourses from their current position. This puts added emphasis on the work to prevent any new discharges from occurring.