Plans to extend an opencast coal mine in Carmarthenshire have been thrown out — the last outstanding proposal of its kind anywhere in the UK.
Carmarthenshire Council refused the application for the Glan Lash site near Ammanford, where Bryn Bach Coal Ltd had wanted to dig for 85,000 tonnes of what it called “premium quality anthracite”.
According to planning documents, the company had applied to extend the mine across 10.03 hectares — around 25 acres — and said the scheme would have created 11 jobs.
It is the second time the company’s plans have been turned down since the opencast mine closed in 2019.
The refusal notice, signed by the council’s head of place and sustainability Rhodri Griffiths and dated 4 June, sets out seven reasons for refusal — almost all centred on the environment.
It says the scheme would adversely affect protected woodland and hedgerows, with the council pointing to the permanent loss of woodland it described as an “irreplaceable habitat”.
Council ecologists said the woodland on the site was 138 years old and supported an “exceptional” number of breeding birds, and that new planting could not replace it.
The council also raised concerns about peat, saying the proposal would cause “the unacceptable disturbance, degradation and loss of peat soils and associated irreplaceable peatland habitat”.
It warned this would harm “biodiversity, ecosystem resilience and carbon storage functions, contributing to climate change and the loss of an important carbon store”.
A further reason concerns a rare butterfly. The notice says the council was not satisfied, “beyond reasonable scientific doubt”, that the Caeau Mynydd Mawr Special Area of Conservation marsh fritillary population would not be harmed.
The marsh fritillary is one of the UK’s most threatened butterflies, a European-protected species for which the area is considered one of the best sites in Britain.
The council’s own landscape officer also weighed in. While he judged the visual impact of the smaller, revised scheme would be limited, he warned the loss of mature woodland was “of greater concern” and could not be readily mitigated in the short term.
The company’s consultants strongly disputed key findings. Its hydrogeologists argued there was no peat on the site at all — a certified soil scientist’s survey, they said, found “peaty loam”, which is not peat — and that the protected area was fed by surface water, not by groundwater the mine would disturb.
They also argued the scheme would ultimately benefit nature, restoring rare grassland and managing it for 17 years in a way that could help the marsh fritillary return.
In its application, Bryn Bach Coal said it had developed “a niche non-thermal market for premium quality anthracite”.
It said there was demand for its coal from industries ranging from water filtration and battery production to green steelmaking.
The campaign group Friends of the Earth Cymru welcomed the refusal.
“This brings to a close years of campaigning, but it also brings a stop to Wales’ last opencast coal mine,” its representative Jenny Lloyd told the BBC, adding it was now an opportunity to remediate the land “for nature and the community”.
Coal Action Network said there were now no live applications for new coal mines anywhere in the UK.
The decision follows the closure of the UK’s largest opencast coal mine, Ffos-y-Fran above Merthyr Tydfil, which shut in 2023 after its operator was refused an extension.
Wales now has one remaining deep mine, at Aberpergwm in Neath Port Talbot.
Bryn Bach Coal has six months to appeal. The BBC reported it had been approached for comment.
