YOUR front page, the articles inside and your comment all totally miss the point (Echo, Jan 31).

Fracking and underground coal gasification (UGC) of the rich northern coastal coalfield will destroy traditional mining jobs, and will waste and rape the vast coalfield.

About 23 trillion tonnes of coal could be mined from seven or eight vast super pits from Wearside to Berwick. These could employ minimally 16,000 miners and their sons and grandsons and greatgrandsons.

This would regenerate the whole Durham Northumbrian coalfield areas.

UCG wrecks any chance of ever traditionally mining the coal. Only four per cent of the vast trapped energy is extracted, leaving the rest unwinnable, useless and wasted.

We should also note traditionally-mined coal can also be gasified, on the surface after extraction, and the remaining coal burned as smokeless fuel and much else.

Northern coalfield MPs should fight these proposals tooth and nail and fight for that £1bn to be invested in restoring the British deep-mined coal industry, and building clean coal, carbon capture and storage power generation.

David Douglass, South Shields.