The Hunter Valley's first coal mine opened at Singleton in 1860. From humble beginnings grew an industry that has underpinned regional and national economies for more than 150 years.
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Today coal mining supports about 14,000 Hunter mining jobs and over 3400 local mining supplier businesses.
NSW Minerals Council figures show it injected $6.2 billion into the Hunter economy last financial year, which was also another record year for exports.
But, despite the impressive statistics, the writing is on the wall for coal.
While climate change activists might take the credit, the reality is the pragmatic economics of coal are responsible for driving global change.
NSW Treasury's 2021 NSW intergenerational report forecasts that coal mining royalties in NSW are expected to more than halve by 2061.
Treasury modelled two scenarios for the decline of coal production jobs in coming decades.
Under the first scenario, coal jobs would decline from the current level of about 22,000 to between 5000 and 10,000 in 2047. In the worst-case scenario, the last coal job in NSW disappears about 2041.
"We need to face the reality that the future of the coal industry in the Hunter is not going to be determined by domestic policy makers. It is going to be determined by the decisions of foreign governments and mining companies," NSW Treasurer Matt Kean told the Newcastle Herald.
"My view is that we should continue to export as much coal as we can while the markets are demanding that product but we also need to prepare for a future where those international markets will be demanding cleaner ways to power their economies with materials built with cleaner inputs to build their economics."
Power and the Passion series:
The Hunter is not alone in facing the challenges resulting from the coal industry's decline.
Like the Hunter, generations of Germans worked in the country's coal mining regions until the winds of economic change forced the country to embark on the world's first energy transition.
And while Germany is credited as having created the blueprint for successful energy transition, those who have witnessed it up close will tell you that it has not come cheaply or without significant social or economic disruption.
And for all its progress towards creating a clean energy economy, the country remains the largest coal consumer and producer in Europe - that is despite a legislated goal to phase out coal by 2038 and reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
In the 1950s the German coal industry employed more than 750,000 people.
But the introduction of cheap imports, new mining technologies and the uptake of oil and gas meant by 2018, the industry employed about 20,000 people.
"Basically we've had 60 years history of phasing down coal; it was occurring for economic reasons long before we started talking about climate reasons," Timon Wehnert, head of the Future Energy and Industry Systems division at Germany's Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy said.
"First there was mechanisation, which meant you need less people. Then more people used gas and oil to heat their homes. All of these things contributed to the decline."
It was a similar story in the Appalachian region of the United States where coal mining jobs declined from a peak of 75,000 in 1949 to 20,000 in 2012.
It was hard to see it wasn't going down every year because it was coming and going. But every time it went down, it went down further.
- Peter Hille, Kentucky Mountain Association
"There was this long slide. There were these boom and bust cycles. It was hard to see it wasn't just going down every year because it was coming and going. But every time it went down, it went down further. Every time it came back up, it didn't come quite back as far as it was before," Peter Hille, Kentucky Mountain Association president, said.
"You had this seesaw effect of a long-term decline, even as coal production was going up because you had fewer miners producing more coal with bigger and bigger machines."
"Those jobs have been going away for a long time. We talk sometimes about a trajectory to this transition. We are a long way down that path, not because we're farther along in moving to alternative fuels but because we've been losing jobs for so long."
In both Germany and the US, the loss of coal jobs coincided with an exodus from the regional areas to the cities - some believe a similar scenario could unfold in the Hunter unless an effective strategy is devised to create new jobs in the region.
"It was very difficult to find a substitute to offset the economic losses that occurred during the phase out of coal," Mr Wehnert said.
To counter the shock, the German government introduced an economic support package that focused on education and tourism to help reimagine and diversify regional economies.
"The question became what are the opportunities and possibilities for people to stay in the region," Mr Wehnert said.
"What are the links between old knowledge, such as what a mining a engineer might possess, and growth areas? Someone with skills controlling water and soil pollution might be able to transfer their skills to a new industry."
In another initiative several lignite mines which close in the 1990s have been flooded and turned into lakes.
"They have actually been developed as very nice recreational areas which are attractive for tourists coming from the surrounding bigger cities on the weekends," Mr Wehnert said.
"If you look at who is profiting from these new tourism jobs it has often been the women. Whereas previously the husband working in the mine secured the family income now it is the wife running a small hotel or renting out an apartment."
Following a failed attempt to revive the Appalachian coal industry during the Trump administration, the Biden administration created an interagency working group to help revitalise coal and power plant communities.
It identified $45 billion in funding to assist communities tap into infrastructure investments, environmental remediation and community development projects.
One program focused on the roll-out of electric vehicles and charging stations in regional and rural areas.
"Electric vehicles are an interesting proposition because our utilities in this area have traditionally been coal-fired. Some see electric vehicles as a real boom for their business model, because people are going to buy more electricity," Mr Hille said.
"In the short term from an environmental perspective (electric vehicles) may actually have a negative impact because we are burning more coal to charge the electric vehicles. But in the long run an electric vehicle could be charged from a variety of different sources. There are studies that show that large fleets of electric vehicles can actually help with the problem of replacing baseload from fossil fuel plants because they could be used as a distributed battery to regulate the load and demand."
In the Hunter, the Hunter Jobs Alliance is one of the key organisations working to ensure the region has an effective strategy to deal with the looming economic challenges and opportunities.
"When we look at other regions, often they don't get organised, get coherent as a community or start to work on the practical things that are required like attracting new jobs or investment until they hit a crisis point," Alliance coordinator Warrick Jordan said.
"The history or regional structural change is it is often very late in the process when people identify that there is a challenge and then it's hard to learn the things that need to be done or implement the things to ensure the community is on the same page.
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