Sawt Falasteen - Czechs wind up black coal mining in green energy switch

Like other European countries, the Czech Republic -- an EU member of 10.9 million -- is divesting from fossil fuels including black coal, used in heating plants or steelworks, to reduce emissions in line with EU targets.

Black coal mining has a tradition spanning over two centuries in the eastern Czech region of Ostrava, once known as the country's "steel heart".

Stefan Pinter, the union head at OKD's CSM mine, blamed "a decline in the use of fossil fuels and coal prices which make mining unprofitable".

"The European Union's green policy set the rules and all the companies around will adapt," he told AFP.

Nuclear plants accounted for 42 percent of Czech electricity output in 2025, followed by coal-fired plants with 32 percent and with renewable sources still lagging way behind.

But the Ostrava region has seen many mines and steelworks shut down over the past few years.

"There is no one to supply coal to in the Czech Republic," said Barbora Cerna Dvorakova, a spokeswoman for OKD.

The last power station using black coal closed last year, and coal prices are too low to even cover the costs of mining, she told AFP.

OKD with 2,300 employees also lacks staff as schools training miners were abandoned in the 1990s.

- Mining job cuts -

Brown and black coal mining employed about 100,000 people in the 1980s, when the former Czechoslovakia was ruled by Moscow-steered communists promoting heavy industry.

But the number has since shrunk to several thousand.

Black coal output has slumped as well, from 35 million tonnes in 1989 to less than 1.2 million tonnes last year.

OKD will now trim its workforce to fewer than 700 staff, which is a cause for concern in the Karvina district where the CSM mine is based and where unemployment reached 9.6 percent last December, twice the Czech rate of 4.8 percent.

"It is definitely a blow, but we have many senior staff who are about to retire," said Pinter. "The rest will have to look for a job."

OKD will now switch to processing purchased coal and producing heat using firedamp -- methane gas produced by coal-mining.

Environmentalists welcomed the shutdown as good news attesting to the country's plan to quit coal mining by 2030, when the last brown coal mine is due to close.

"We can finally see it on the horizon," said Jaroslav Bican, head of the energy campaign at Greenpeace Czech Republic.

"We know that coal miners no longer profit from producing coal which will be phased out sooner than it seemed a few years ago," he told AFP.

C.Hamad--SF-PST