The View from England: Win their hearts, and minds will follow

I shed tears within 30 pages. I expect you would too and, if you’re a miner, so you should. In a recently-published novel we are taken back to a small mining town in October 1966 when our industry killed children, young children, half a school of them.

Published by Faber & Faber, ‘A Terrible Kindness’ reminds us (as Jo Browning Wroe writes in her opening sentence) of when “something dreadful happened in Wales.” In Aberfan on that dark morning, 116 children (mostly between the ages of seven and 10) went to school and didn’t come back.

Their school roof poking above a sea of coal slurry is an image that will never fade, but many have been able to rationalize what happened. The spoil heap above Pantglas Junior School had an unusual composition and safe slope angles were compromised, the rain was heavy and the spring beneath the dump forgotten. (Legislation followed against this happening again, and the engineering geology of waste dumps was advanced and adopted world-wide.)

Hearts are not so easily repaired. A nation that had long embraced mining was betrayed, and the mining industry (everywhere) needs hearts as well as minds on its side. Cold calculation and rational reasoning are not enough. For that reason we are mistaken in our knee jerk, critical outpouring against the end-April tightening of Mexico’s mining legislation.

It is not often that I disagree with Ross Beaty but, in a recent interview with The Northern Miner, the mining entrepreneur described the government’s move as “aggressive” and “extremely damaging” to Mexico’s mining industry. Perhaps it is, but he is fighting the wrong battle.

Beaty is correct, of course, to argue that the Mexican government’s new requirements will damage inward mining investment. He is focused, however, on influencing minds, and it is the hearts of a nation that need convincing.

The new Mexican law shortens mining concessions from 50 to 30 years, tightens water-extraction permits and raises environmental bonds. It also changes the first-come-first-served grant system to a bidding process, increases remuneration to local communities and punishes speculation (by allowing concessions to be cancelled if no work is done within two years). Exclusive exploration rights are now granted to a public entity, Servicio Geológico Mexicano (which may enter into agreements with private parties).

Taken at face value, these measures will seem reasonable to a majority of the public in most mining jurisdictions as we have failed to secure the necessary trust in existing mining practices. Staggeringly, this trust has just been breached again in Wales, and barely 10km north of Aberfan.

After 16 years, during which some 11 million tonnes of coal has been extracted, the Ffos-y-Fran opencast mine near Merthyr Tydfil has closed after an 18-month extension was rejected. Merthyr South Wales Ltd (MSWL) had asked to continue working until March 2024 (its original planning approval ended in September 2022), arguing that the additional revenue was required to fund a two-year reclamation scheme that had been arranged when it won planning permission in 2005.

Local residents say their lives have been blighted by coal dust and noise, and are furious that the local authority has not enforced remedial action to mitigate what they describe as a “scar on the mountain side.”

MSWL admitted that “insufficient funds” had been set aside to complete the restoration of the land (as agreed 18 years previously), and that time was needed to put forward and consult on a revised plan. The planning-extension meeting was told, however, that there was “a very real risk that one of the substantial benefits of the scheme will not be delivered.”

South Wales suffered a similar betrayal in 2010 when Celtic Energy Ltd. switched ownership of four open-cast coal mines to avoid restoration liabilities. In a subsequent fraud case, the judge ruled that the six defendants “had not acted unlawfully, regardless of whether or not they had acted dishonestly,” and said he could not judge “commercial morality.”

Companies such as these two in South Wales do huge damage to our whole industry; damn them!

We all know that mining can be justified to rational minds. What remains to be done is demonstrate that our hearts are in the right place. Reasoning with the public is one thing, laying claim to their emotions is something else entirely.

Dr. Chris Hinde is a mining engineer and the director of Pick and Pen Ltd., a U.K.-based consulting firm. He previously worked for S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Metals and Mining division.