The Burning Stone

The hill above Kiviõli has a ski slope on it, a tubing run, a motocross track and a chairlift. It is not a hill. It is about a hundred metres of spent oil shale, tipped there over decades by the plant at its foot, and it stands in a county where the natural high ground is measured in tens of metres and the highest point in the whole country — Suur Munamägi, 318 metres — is a hundred and eighty kilometres away in the other corner. Estonia built itself a mountain out of what was left after burning rock, and then put a lift on it.

This is Ida-Virumaa, and for most of a century it did something no other country has done at scale: it ran a national electricity grid on oil shale. At the peak, roughly nine-tenths of Estonian electricity came out of two power stations outside Narva. That gave Estonia the most carbon-intensive electricity in the European Union. It also made Estonia one of the very few EU states that did not need a molecule of anyone else's gas to keep the lights on. Those two facts are the same fact, and everything happening in this county now follows from trying to keep the second while getting rid of the first.

What the rock actually is

Kukersite is a marine sediment laid down in the Ordovician, something like 460 million years ago, and named after the manor at Kukruse where it was first properly described. It is full of kerogen, which is why it burns, and full of a great deal else, which is why it burns badly. Its energy content is a fraction of decent coal. You dig an enormous quantity of stone to release a modest quantity of heat, and something close to half of what you brought up comes back out as ash.

That ash had to go somewhere, and where it went was up. The plateaus at Kohtla-Järve and Kiviõli, the fields beside the Narva plants — this is the largest source of waste by mass in Estonia by a wide margin, so much so that the national waste statistics are effectively a graph of one industry. Some of it is alkaline enough that rainwater running off it comes out closer to oven cleaner than to rain. Some of it, capped and planted, is now a sports centre. The distance between those two sentences is the whole political problem of the region.

Estonia's dirtiest industry was also its most sovereign one: the only fuel in the country that nobody abroad could switch off.

Why the towns are Russian-speaking

The Narva power stations went up in the 1960s and early 1970s and were, for a long time, the largest oil-shale-fired plants in the world. Building and running them required tens of thousands of workers, and the Soviet Union brought them in from across the union rather than from Estonian farms. Narva had been almost entirely destroyed in 1944; what was rebuilt was a Russian-speaking industrial city, and it still is one, at well over ninety per cent. Kohtla-Järve and Sillamäe were built the same way, for the same reason. When people in Tallinn discuss closing the shale industry, they are discussing the employment of a linguistic minority in the county with the country's highest unemployment, on the border with Russia. Nobody involved is unaware of this.

The price that killed it

What began to close the plants was not a protest or a directive. It was arithmetic. Under the EU emissions trading scheme every tonne of carbon dioxide has to be paid for, and the price sat in single figures for years while shale electricity stayed profitable. When it climbed through the mid-twenties and then kept going, the sums inverted. Burning a low-energy rock produces a lot of carbon per unit of electricity, so a carbon price hits it harder than it hits anything else, and it hit almost overnight. Units were mothballed, output collapsed, and the state moved capacity into strategic reserve to keep the grid standing. The energy crisis after 2022 brought some of it back, briefly, which told everyone exactly what the reserve was for.

What replaces it, and what does not

The stated targets are to stop generating electricity from oil shale by 2035 and to end oil shale use altogether by 2040. Wind is the plan, onshore and eventually offshore in the Gulf of Riga, and the country's Just Transition money from Brussels points almost entirely at this one county. The awkward part is shale oil. Rather than burn the rock, the industry increasingly cooks it into a liquid fuel, much of which has gone to sea as marine bunker fuel — a market that the International Maritime Organization's 0.5 per cent sulphur cap in 2020 rearranged considerably. Shale oil emits less at the Estonian end than shale electricity did. It is still oil, and it is the industry's survival plan.

Going to look at it

You can, and it is the most interesting two days in Estonia. At Kohtla-Nõmme the mining museum takes you underground in a real mine, on the mine train, with a guide who worked it; it is cold down there whatever the month, so take a jacket in August. At Kiviõli you can ski the ash. Narva castle stares at Ivangorod fortress across a river narrow enough to see faces on the other bank, and the town hall is one of the very few baroque buildings that survived 1944. The easy version of what you are looking at is a dirty industry closing and a country cleaning up; the version people here will give you is that the rock kept the lights on through fifty years of occupation and thirty of independence, and that the county which produced the electricity is now being asked to absorb the cost of stopping. Both are true. Stand on the ash hill at Kiviõli, look north at the sea and south at the mine, and you are standing on the argument.