www.bloomberg.com /features/2023-japan-coal-mine/

Japan's Support for Coal Undermines Its Climate Goals

Yoshiaki Nohara14-18 minutes

Kushiro Coal Mine Co. operates Japan's last underground coal facility below the Pacific Ocean. Videographer: Noriko Hayashi/Bloomberg

Inside the Fight to Keep Japan’s Last Underground Coal Mine Open

Workers at the century-old facility in Kushiro are passing on skills and technologies to groom a new generation of coal miners.

October 26, 2023 at 7:00 PM GMT+10

Tadamichi Ikeda watches with folded arms as seven trainees work by the light of their headlamps inside Japan’s last underground coal mine. The students had come from Vietnam to learn from master miners who, speaking through interpreters, explained how to safely assemble a wooden structure to protect against falling rocks: Watch your surroundings. Keep an eye on your teammates. Small mistakes can be deadly.

“They’re like kids to us,” says 62-year-old Ikeda.

The last-of-its-kind mine and its government-funded program for overseas workers, both operated by Kushiro Coal Mine Co., should no longer exist. At least not according to the spirit of international climate commitments and the economic logic that’s put the rest of Japan’s mines out of business. Climate scientists and researchers at the International Energy Agency are clear that coal infrastructure needs to go extinct soon, with no new facilities built, in order to slow rising temperatures. More than 200,000 next-generation miners who have passed through the Japanese training program on their way to jobs in China, Indonesia and Vietnam need to have short careers if the world is to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

Veteran miners in Kushiro teach their young students from abroad how to extract coal safely. Photographer and videographer: Noriko Hayashi/Bloomberg

But Japanese politicians and executives have done everything they can to keep the mine running, insisting a net-zero future can accommodate the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel.

The push to preserve coal, reflected in the billions of yen in subsidies KCM receives, has irked Japan’s developed-nation peers. Like the rest of the Group of Seven, Japan has pledged to virtually eliminate planet-warming carbon emissions by 2050, but it refused to join a pledge to end the use of coal by 2030. Japan, which accounted for more than half of the $6.6 billion G-7 nations invested in coal in 2019, also got the group to agree to a loophole that allows it to invest in some coal facilities at home and overseas as long as they are fitted with emissions-reducing technologies.

The Japanese government plans for coal — mostly imported — to make up almost a fifth of the country’s energy mix by 2030. Its leaders argue that Japan needs coal and gas to serve as backup energy sources, and mixing it with other fuels such as wood and ammonia, and capturing carbon dioxide, will help limit its warming impact. Large solar farms are also out, they say, due to space constraints, and nuclear power still faces opposition after the Fukushima disaster.

The residents of Kushiro, a city of about 160,000 on the northern island of Hokkaido, are more ambivalent about the continued reliance on coal. Ikeda is proud to pass his skills to his Vietnamese students; he also wants his son to stay away from a physically punishing industry that’s in decline. “I wouldn’t want him here,” he says, “We are struggling to get new hires. Even if we do, they don’t last long.”

The century-old coal mine, once a symbol of prosperity, today relies on government subsidies to stay open.