A new mining tunnel, which will become the UK’s longest when it is completed, will burrow under a natural beauty spot and finish close to a beautiful seaside town.
When fully built, the Woodsmith Mine Tunnel will run from the Wilton International complex in Teesside to Woodsmith Mine in Sneatonthorpe near Whitby, North Yorkshire, in order to mine potash and polyhalite on the moors above Whitby and transport it out via the UK’s longest conveyer belt.
Production is currently earmarked to begin in the tunnel in 2027 after it was pushed back from 2021 by operators Anglo American, which acquired the mine when it purchased Sirius Minerals for £405m, saying it would implement an “extended project and ramped-up schedule” which would require “higher capital expenditure than envisaged at the time of acquisition”.
Anglo American crop nutrients boss Tom McCulley says predictions that the project will exceed £7bn are “not too far off”, with work on the tunnel said to have already set the company back almost £5bn.
At the beginning of the project, it had been hoped the entire project would be completed at a cost of £1.1bn.
While preparatory work began in 2016, an official ceremony to “break ground” was held in 2018.
As of November last year, the tunnel stretched 16 miles, with a train trundling along a two-and-a-half-hour journey every day to supply the tunnel boring machine with steel frames and concrete segments, with the machine moving forward 25m per day.
Above ground on the North York Moors there are no signs of the jumbo task being undertaken below as sheep wander around over the top.
Close to Whitby, two innocuous barns have been erected over the main entrances in order to keep them out of public view, the shafts below will be the deepest in Europe.
When initially proposing the plan in 2015, Sirius Minerals defied critics by overcoming 98 environmental regulations to obtain planning permission to build what will be Britain’s first deep mine in more than 40 years located in the middle of a national park.
The firm, which is based in Scarborough, made significant progress given its size but eventually costs put it within weeks of administration in 2020 before Anglo American swooped.
However, once the machine gets up to its full capacity of 13 million tonnes a year of the core minerals required for fertiliser, including potassium, magnesium and calcium, the British-American company hopes it will make an average of just under £2bn per year in annual revenue.
Mr McCully was brought in on the project following his success at Anglo’s large Quellaveco mine in Peru in order to clean up the “cumbersome” operation.
He told the Times: “At first, I thought I would just get 1,000 trucks a day to carry this stuff to port instead of the tunnel — but it massively reduces cost down the line. There is a structural advantage over competitors.
“There are no piles of tailings; no inland routes of thousands of kilometres of rail. We control the logistics from pit to port. It’s as close as you can get to going straight from the ground to the farm.”
