Turow mine in Poland: the coal of wrath

Five hundred thousand euros a day. It is the sanction taken by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) against Poland, Monday, September 20, to force it to stop operating one of the most polluting coal mines in the EU, which is at the heart of an important diplomatic and economic battle in central Europe.

But the prospect of having to pay a hefty bill to the European Commission did not shake Warsaw’s resolve. “We will not be closing the Turow mine. Since the start of this case, we are of the opinion that the suspension of activity in Turow would threaten the stability of our electricity network ”, reacted Piotr Mueller, the spokesman of the Polish government, in a press release.

Water stories

The Turow mine, located in the southwest of Poland a few kilometers from the borders with Germany and the Czech Republic, has in recent years become one of the main subjects of environmental discord between the three countries.

It is the Czech Republic that is the most upset against this gigantic coal mine. Prague accuses PGE, the main Polish electricity producer and operator of the mine, of harming not only the environment but also, and above all, the well-being of the inhabitants of the Czech municipalities close to the border.

The Czech Republic thought it was done with the Turow case in early January, when the mining concession for this site, opened in 1907, finally came to an end. But that was without taking into account the stubbornness of Warsaw, which decided to allow PGE to continue mining coal from Turow until 2044.

It was too much and Prague decided in February 2021 to bring the case to European justice which ruled in its favor. three months later. But Warsaw turned a deaf ear for the first time. The CJEU then decided to press Poland with the penalty sentence of 500,000 euros per day because the situation seemed “urgent” to it.

What urgency? The Turow mine threatens to deprive entire towns in the Czech Republic of access to water, says the CJEU. This is also the problem raised by Prague for almost five years.

The mine, in fact, stretches over 20 kilometers and Poland extracts lignite, the most polluting form of coal possible. But to reach it, you have to dig ever lower, and over the decades, the miners have descended, in places, to more than 200 meters deep. This creates depressions which tend to attract neighboring rivers to the depths of the mine, helping to dry up water points for neighboring municipalities.

In a report on the Turow mine case published in June 2020, the European Environment Board (EEB, a collective of European NGOs for the protection of the environment), underlines that PGE “pumps 40 liters of water per second in its mine in Turow, which is the equivalent of the water consumption for the 350,000 inhabitants of the Czech town of Liberec and adjacent villages [qui jouxtent la frontière polonaise, NDLR]”.

There have already been water cuts due to mining activity in Poland, several media have noted – including the BBC and the New York Times – who visited villages on the Czech side of the border. But the situation is likely to worsen because PGE intends to push the operation of the Turow site even further, going as far as digging nearly 100 meters from the Czech border, said the Politico site.

Environmental risks

The Germans have their own grievances on this issue. The Land of Saxony, which borders Poland at the Turow mine, complains about the pollution generated by coal factories which transform lignite into electricity and make the air difficult to breathe at the border. Besides, a geological study published in October 2020 concludes that mining activity contributes to weakening the soil to such an extent that it has created serious risks of land subsidence under the German city of Zittau.

But Germany preferred not to join the legal action led by the Czech Republic in order not to throw coal on the fire of a very sensitive case for Warsaw.

PGE continues to brandish the economic importance of the Turow mine in an attempt to silence critics. On its own, it produces more than 5% of all electricity generated in Poland and is used directly to supply energy to 2.3 million Poles. It is also the only source of energy for hospitals and schools in the area of ​​the city of Bogatynia.

Almost all the adult men of this town of more than 15,000 inhabitants work in this mine, underlines the New York Times. PGE even adds that the income of around 80,000 Poles in the region depended directly or indirectly on mining activity.

But the battle for the future of the Turow mine is not just economic. It is also very political for the Polish government which holds its addiction to coal against thick and thin … and Brussels.

Question of national sovereignty

Poland remains 80% dependent on coal for its electricity production (54% for the Czech Republic and 43% for Germany) and considers the pace at which it is moving to cleaner energy sources to be its sovereignty.

There is therefore no question of complying with the demands of the EU, which wants to bring Poland back on the right environmental path in the name of the objectives of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The very populist and ultra-conservative Polish president, Andrzej Duda, has made the Turow mine a symbol of resistance against the “diktat” of Brussels. Its supporters thus demonstrated this summer in front of the headquarters of the European Commission, waving placards which read “yesterday the Soviet Union, today the European Union which wants to rob us of our sovereignty”.

But it wasn’t just opportunism that Andrzej Duda turned coal into some kind of national cause. Historically, the Polish coal industry was a national pride in Soviet times, and the miners were very well paid. This explains why the miners’ unions, even after the fall of communism, retained a very important political weight, recalls the BBC.

Poland also considers coal as a guarantor of its energy independence from Russia, describes the New York Times. According to Warsaw, the energy transition led by Germany has put Berlin in a situation of dependence on Russian gas, which is unacceptable for a country “which does not feel safe in the shadow of the Russian neighbor” , continues the American daily. Even if it means depriving thousands of Czechs of access to running water?