Britain’s modern history was built on one resource and rescued, temporarily, by another. Coal made it the first industrial nation; North Sea oil and gas transformed its finances in the 1970s and 1980s; and wind is now doing something similar for its electricity supply.
Coal
The foundation of everything. Britain sat on enormous, shallow and accessible coal reserves in Yorkshire, the North East, Lancashire, South Wales and central Scotland, and it was that accident of geology as much as anything that made the Industrial Revolution happen here first.
The industry employed over a million men at its peak. It declined through the twentieth century, collapsed after the 1984-85 miners’ strike, and ended with the closure of the last deep pit at Kellingley in 2015. Britain generated no electricity from coal at all for extended periods from 2019 onwards, and the last coal-fired power station closed in 2024.
North Sea oil and gas
Commercial production began in 1975, transforming Britain from an energy importer into a net exporter and generating enormous tax revenues through the 1980s.
What was done with that money is one of the great British economic arguments. Norway placed its equivalent revenues in a sovereign wealth fund now worth well over a trillion dollars; Britain spent its through general taxation. Whether this was a historic error or a reasonable response to the economic conditions of the time is still argued about, usually along party lines.
Production peaked around 1999 and has declined substantially since. Britain is once again a net energy importer, and new North Sea licensing is now a contested climate issue rather than a straightforward economic one.
Wind
Britain’s most significant current resource, and an unlikely success story. The country sits in the path of Atlantic weather systems with a long, shallow continental shelf — ideal conditions for offshore wind.
Capacity has grown dramatically, with vast arrays including Dogger Bank and Hornsea off the east coast. Wind is now regularly the single largest source of British electricity, and on windy days has supplied over half of total demand. Costs have fallen far faster than almost anyone forecast.
The remaining problems are intermittency, grid capacity — there is not enough transmission infrastructure to move power from Scotland to where it is needed — and planning delays for onshore projects.
Everything else
- Tin and copper in Cornwall, worked from the Bronze Age and now exhausted commercially — though lithium extraction is being explored in the same granite.
- China clay, still quarried in Cornwall, and used in ceramics and paper.
- Limestone, slate, gypsum and aggregates — quarried extensively, and the reason for the slate landscapes of North Wales, now a World Heritage Site.
- Water — abundant in the north and west, scarce in the south-east, which is drier than parts of the Mediterranean per head and increasingly under strain.
- Fish — historically vital, still politically charged out of all proportion to its economic size, and central to the Brexit negotiations.