Lignite is a soft brown coal - somewhere between coal and peat, which when burned releases more Carbon Dioxide, weight for weight, than most other fossil fuels. It is used in much the same way as coal.

Lignite is already mined in Canada, Greece, the USA and Germany. In 1984 an Australian mining giant Meekatharra Minerals (subsequently renamed Auiron) was granted a license to prospect lignite deposits to the North and East of Ballymoney town in Co. Antrim. The Company sank 16 drill holes and spent the next 18 years gathering data. They discovered a lignite deposit of approximately 700 million tonnes deep below the ground.

In November 2002, Auiron (operating under the name of their subsidiary Ballymoney Power) quietly submitted a planning application for an open-cast lignite mine and power station development just outside Ballymoney town. At no point were local people consulted by the company with regard to these plans, and only when local residents received notification from the Belfast Planning Office that such an application had been submitted, were people made aware of the enormity of the threat facing their communities.

In response to the proposal, local people quickly organised themselves into a protest group ‘Just Say No To Lignite Mining’. With support from the World Wildlife Fund and Friends of the Earth, contact was made with anti-lignite mining groups in Germany. A BBC documentary film crew accompanied several members of the Just Say No To Lignite campaigners on a fact-finding mission to the Rhineland in April 2003, where they visited a working lignite mine and met local residents. It was only then that the real horror of what was being proposed for Co. Antrim became apparent.

Devastation from Mining
The Rhineland in Germany has been home to lignite mining for over 30 years and the area now presents a stark example of the devastation that open-cast mining brings.

The RWE Rheinbraun mining company extracts lignite from the three largest pits in Europe, and has so far depleted and estimated 260km² of land. As in Co. Antrim the lignite lies deep below a fertile cultivated landscape, but everything above it must be taken away for extraction to take place.

In Germany approximately 460 million tonnes of overburden (fertile loess loam, clay, gravel and sand) are removed annually to extract 100 million tonnes of lignite.

The landscape is literally peeled back and piled up to form an immense spoil heap. Simultaneously, thousands of pumps are deployed to ensure that the groundwater table drops below the deepest point in the mine, thus drying the lignite.

The draining process catastrophically affects the water courses of not just the mine area but the entire surrounding region. Springs, streams and rivers have dried up and entire ecosystems are disrupted, if not completely destroyed.

A similar open cast mining operation in the Ballymoney area would directly affect the River Bush and its tributaries, and would impact upon the Garry Bog, a designated area of special scientific interest.

In the Rheinland region of Germany, more than ten thousand acres of ancient woodland - the Hambach Forest - will be completely destroyed by open cast mining in the next ten or fifteen years.

On visiting the open cast mines in the Aachen area of the Rheinland, the members of the Just Say No To Lignite group all experienced physical discomfort from the dust circulating in the atmosphere. Adverse reactions included eye inflammation and throat irritation. Local people confirmed that many health problems, mainly respiratory, had been experienced by those living around the mines, with asthma and bronchitis particularly prevalent. Harder to quantify was the psychological scarring resulting from being uprooted from their communities and ancestral homes, and being forcibly relocated away from the path of the ever-creeping mine. In one region alone, it is estimated that more than 30,000 people had lost their homes to lignite mining since 1948, and over 58 villages have been destroyed. Planned expansions of existing mines mean that as many as 10,000 more people will be forced to leave their native homesteads in the years to come.

Fighting Back
Armed with the knowledge of what open-cast lignite mining would really mean for the people of North Antrim, the Just Say No To Lignite campaigners arranged a series of public information meetings across Antrim and in the neighbouring towns and districts and invited Ballymoney Power to attend - an offer the company never accepted.

By the end of April 2003, the Planning Office in Belfast had received 37,000 letters of objection to the proposed mine development - making it the largest ever planning objection in Northern Ireland. Objections focused primarily on two main areas of concern: the health and environmental impacts, but there were also concerns about economic issues: electricity produced from lignite is highly vulnerable to price fluctuation owing to the low grade nature of the fuel and the high levels of emissions. The proposed lignite mine and adjacent power station would offer no compensating social advantages such as increased employment and investment for the area. The lignite deposit lies beneath prime agricultural land, currently supporting over 80 farms and 300 jobs.

Lignite mine construction involves specialised engineering and the plan for Ballymoney obviously intended to make use of migrant workers, as workers encampments were included in the proposal. Once operational, a mine is almost fully automated, with often less than 20 employees needed. The loss of jobs in farming, small business and tourism would be devastating for the area.

In response to the thousands of objections to the planning application, the Planning Office then entered into a long period of consultation. In the meantime, the Just Say No To Lignite campaign continued holding meetings and set up information stalls at events all around North Antrim. One event featuring a ‘Buy A Balloon Campaign’ to illustrate just how far pollution from the mine-site might travel. A £1 donation released a biodegradable balloon and tag into the sky from the mine area. Anyone finding a balloon was asked to return the tag in order to provide data on how far, and in which directions, pollution from the Power Plant would travel. The winning balloon was returned from 230 miles away in Aberdeenshire, with others reaching Lewis and as far south as Dublin. One balloon travelled from Ballymoney to Perthshire in an afternoon: 150 miles in a few hours.

In December 2003, the Planners requested that Ballymoney Power provide substantial additional information in relation to their planning application.

All 37 of the consultation bodies (including RSPB, NIE, Fisheries, Water/Roads Services, Council for Natural Conservation and the Countryside, Climate Change Unit, Environmental Heritage, Health Boards and Councils in N.Ireland/Eire/Scotland) had rejected the application. Many people called for a Public Enquiry to resolve the issue.

By this stage it became clear to Ballymoney Power’s parent company (now called Felix Resources) that they were facing an uphill battle if their plans for the open cast mine and power station were ever to become a reality. In the summer of 2004 they withdrew their planning application.

Hardly surprisingly, the people of North Antrim felt they had secured a great victory.

The threat of lignite mining, however, remains as real today as ever. Although no actual planning application rests with the planners at this present time, it seems only a matter of time before one does. Felix Resources and their predecessors have spent too many millions of Australian dollars over the past 20 years gathering the necessary data and putting their original plan together, to simply let it lie. They may have withdrawn their original proposal, but they did so armed with the full details of what was unacceptable about it. It is hard to imagine them foolish enough to lodge a future proposal that has not addressed and remedied any of the shortcomings of the first.

Even if Felix Resources no longer have much enthusiasm for another round with the people of North Antrim, there are plenty of other mining companies who could easily afford to purchase that precious data and submit a plan themselves. This possible interest by other mining companies was well illustrated when the Just Say No To Lignite campaign were informed that the NI Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment had received a new application for a mining licence, which requested permission to start mining in 2008. Just Say No To Lignite have written to the Dept on two occasions for further information on which company had submitted the application, but have received no reply.

A New Uncertainty
There was further uncertainty and upset for the people of North Antrim in 2005 with the publication of the final draft of the Northern Area Plan. This document stipulated that the lignite deposit should be held in reserve for possible future mining. It also trebles the total area designated for mining activities. The enlarged area will include many more homes and farms. A new Public Enquiry will take place. The Just Say No To Lignite campaign intends to make representation and it will propose that the wording [of the plan] is changed, so that the lignite area is protected from mining rather than reserved for mining. This proposal, if adopted, would have to be upheld until 2016 and would give the people of North Antrim some much needed breathing space.

At the present time, that seems as good as it gets. The long term threat of open cast lignite mining remains as big as ever.