http://www.ft.com/intl/companies/mining
In parts of Istanbul, as in most Turkish cities, you can smell the coming of winter before you properly feel it. Just as the first cold spell arrives, a woolly, sour blanket of smoke, pumped into the air from coal-fired furnaces, settles over the city’s poor neighbourhoods.
Turks are noticeably better off than a decade ago, but with the prospect of high natural gas bills, many still rely on coal to heat their homes. More than 2m families rely on the state to provide it for free.
Under a programme launched by the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party in 2003, a government agency hands out about 2m tons of coal to underprivileged families each year.
For a country that depends on imports for roughly 70 per cent of its rapidly growing energy needs, coal appears to be both part of the solution and part of the problem.
Over the next decade, Turkey’s government plans to increase the share of coal in electricity production, from 25 to 30 per cent. To help meet its goal of total installed capacity of 120,000MWs by 2023, it also plans to tap into all the country’s coal reserves.
“They plan to mine coal wherever they can find it,” says Ozgur Gurbuz, an energy and environment expert. The danger, he says, is that this may drive up the rate of fatalities in Turkey’s mines.
Between 2007 and 2012, 4.6 miners died for each million tons produced in Turkey, compared with 0.2 in the US, 1.3 in India and 7.4 in China, according to a recent paper by the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (Tepav), an Ankara think-tank.
This year alone, 301 people died after a fire broke out in a mine in Soma, near the Aegean coast, which produced coal for state-owned Turkish Coal Enterprises (TKI). In October, a flood buried 18 workers inside a mine in Ermenek, in the south.
The main culprit, says Mr Gurbuz, is a flawed privatisation model. By awarding licences to mine operators that offer it the highest possible royalty per kW/hour, the state opens the way for companies to sacrifice safety for profit.
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