Beginning the Industrial Revolution actually might not require local coal reserves. From
"Coal and the Industrial Revolution, 1700-1869":
Tbh this article really doesn't make a very convincing argument. It uses hypotheticals that have nothing to do with real life to try and prove a very weak point... For example: that passage you quoted from the article's conclusion is referencing a "what if" scenario earlier in the article in which the authors speculated that IF England had had no coal reserves of its own, and IF the Netherlands or Ireland had had vast reserves instead, and IF extraction costs there were the same, and IF transports costs to England had been the same as they were historically within England*** THEN the lack of local reserves wouldn't necessarily have fundamentally changed the course of the industrial revolution in England... Or, in short: if you move the coal out of England but keep it just as accessible to the English then it won't change much... Wow, thanks captain obvious. It might be true, but it also doesn't really mean anything.
Furthermore this comes with the caveat (***) that they're specifically referring to the transport costs of coal from the mines around the Tyne (near Newcastle) to London, which constituted a 600+ kilometer long journey, assuming these can be applied universally. But this statistic doesn't actually mean all that much in regard to the early industrial revolution because the most coal-intensive heavy industries weren't in London, they were as close to the coal mines as possible up in the Black Country, Manchester, Newcastle, etc. And for good reason, the majority of the price of coal in London constituted transport costs, whereas these costs near the mines were negligible. So if England had had no coal of its own and the deposits had been in the Netherlands instead, would England's industrial centers have had easy and cheap access to that coal, really? The answer is simple: no.
After that it briefly brings up the question that actually matters, "what if England had had no coal reserves AND there had been no equivalents to make up for it" and they (correctly) say that coal could have been substituted with firewood, it then seems to go well as they admit England didn't have wood in great enough quantities to sustainably produce the equivalent amount of energy as was consumed historically from coal... They even straight up admit that because of this heavy industry would most likely not have developed in England but somewhere like the Baltic (which had far more woods)... Only to immediately dismiss this in the very next sentence because this scenario is "too far removed from reality", as if their own counterfactual wasn't just as far removed from it.
They also try to brush off the lower energy density of firewood by basically saying "I'm sure they would have found a way to capture the energy more efficiently". As if that changes the fact that the energy content of firewood is simply lower. Not to mention, imagine how much larger an oven would have to be in order to be able to handle the larger volume of firewood being burned instead of coal. It would be considerably harder to produce an equal amount of energy from firewood instead of coal. This hypothetical doesn't end with a simple maths equation you do on the back of a napkin, it has practical implications beyond the theoretical volume of wood you have to burn.
As another example, with table 3 the authors claim that the introduction of steam power from coal only provided a “modest” advantage in the mining industry over the traditional use of horses for purposes like pumping mines because the price of steam power per hour (including the cost of the machinery itself) was “only” 25-30% of that of an equivalent output by horses... For starters I don’t know in what reality anybody would dismiss something being 4x cheaper as only a modest advantage. Furthermore this calculation is certainly an underestimation as they only account for the cost of feeding said horses, completely disregarding any other costs such as the wages of the laborers that have to look after them, the cost of new animals, the construction of stables, the purchase of land for the animals to live on, or the reserve of horses that had to operate in shifts throughout the day (generally you'd need 3x the number of horses used to operate the gin, so an 8-hourse gin would need 24 horses to cover a full day).
As mines deepened the additional costs would not be insignificant, and would grow to be prohibitive. The average 18th century mine owned roughly 50 to 60 horses to pump up water, take into consideration that most mines were still shallow at this point... In contrast one deeper mine in Warwickshire that was 300 feet deep is known to have possessed a total of five hundred horses to operate the pumps. If this doesn't illustrate the exponential growth in operating costs I don't know what would. By the early 19th century most mines would exceed this depth by a considerable margin. The mining industry could not have developed this way if it had needed to continue to rely on horse power, the sheer number of horses needed would have been unaffordable and unmanageable.
