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It's hard to visualise, but imagine opencast mining taking place at the bottom of the ocean, where huge remote-controlled machines would excavate rocks from the seabed and pump them up to the surface.

At former US mining group National Coal, the crisis it faced was repeated protests in the early 2000s by environmentalists who objected to its opencast mining in east Tennessee.

"I think it should go ahead, opencast mining has been here for a lot of years and it has never hurt anyone. It's a really beneficial thing for us… it needs to go ahead."

Protesters want a moratorium -a suspension - on Welsh opencast mining.

But opencast mining, now the source of much of the world’s coal, rips away topsoil and gobbles water.