2023-10-14 05:00:06
We can still smell the fresh paint in the building where the 3,850 miners of the Moszczenica mine once changed and showered, in Jastrzebie-Zdroj, in Silesia, in the south-west of Poland, definitively liquidated in 2001. The 2 September, the building reopened its doors to the public. It is now here that the Institute of Heritage and Dialogue operates, responsible for a brand new cultural center. On four floors, an interactive exhibition immerses visitors in the unique history of this locality of 80,000 inhabitants: from the pretty spa town that it was in the 19th century.e century until the mining town that it became in the middle of the 20th centurye century, and where the architectural canons of the socialist realism.
The local state-owned mining company, Jastrzebska Spolka Weglowa SA (JSW), majority owned by the Polish National Treasury, continues to mine each year 15 million tonnes of metallurgical coal. Rich in carbon and essential for the production of steel, this type of coal is included in the register of strategic resources of the European Union (EU). JSW is the major producer.
Although several of the city’s mines – including Moszczenica – stopped producing in the 1990s and 2000s, there remain four whose closure is not on the agenda. A respite for the 25,000 miners it employs, including 5,000 people who live in Jastrzebie-Zdroj.
“Young people no longer want to work in the mine”
The parenthesis might, however, be short-lived if hydrogen were to replace coke, the fuel produced in blast furnaces by metallurgical coal, more quickly than expected. “It is already possible to use hydrogen, except that it is only green in 1% of cases. We are therefore going to need metallurgical coal for a transition which will last at least twenty years, probably thirty, which does not prevent Jastrzebie-Zdroj from eventually having to get rid of it too., recalls Adam Juszczak, analyst at the Polish Economic Institute.
But it is above all coal, a more ordinary coal used for its calorific properties, that Poland has. This black gold, which supports Silesian families from father to son, still generates 70% of the electricity in the country. Today, his days are numbered. In 2020, the government announced a timetable for moving away from coal, planning to close thirteen mines by 2049, a year before the EU reaches carbon neutrality.
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