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Gold/Mining/Energy : Mining News of Note -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LoneClone who wrote (29477)	11/25/2008 10:43:24 AM
From: LoneClone	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 193970

Underground mining comes to an end at BHP’s Douglas colliery miningweekly.com By: Christy van der Merwe Published on 24th November 2008 WITBANK (miningweekly.com) – It was the end of an era on Monday as BHP Billiton’s Douglas colliery completed its final underground mining shift at 08:00. Underground mining has taken place at this operation, near Witbank in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province, for over 112 years. The processing plant would continue to operate on various opencast pit operations at the mine. The Douglas-Middelburg Optimisation (DMO) project, which will combine the resources from the adjacent reserves of the Douglas colliery and the Middelburg mine, would now start, whereby unmined underground pillars would be mined from the surface. The project would start with the removal of plant and equipment from underground. Because only some 46% of the coal can be mined from underground, the remaining coal pillars, between depths of 30 m and 60 m, would be retrieved through opencast methods. The DMO project would also entail the recycling and cleaning of discard dump material, and, once de-stoned, that low-quality coal would be used to supply Eskom’s Duwa power station. The processing plant at Douglas colliery produces about one-million tons of coal a month and has about 260 processing and engineering employees. About 99% of the coal produced is destined for the export market, with the remaining supply sold to ArcelorMittal South Africa for its Saldanha works. The coal is transported by Transnet Freight Rail through the Richards Bay Coal Terminal. The plant would continue to process more than 700 000 t/m of coal, however, the feed would come solely from opencast operations. “Unfortunately, this means we will be more at the mercy of the weather,” said BHP Billiton process plant manager Leon van Tonder. It was envisaged that the DMO project would continue mining at Douglas until 2010. The tonnages making up for the declining output from the Douglas colliery were expected to be made up from the BHP Billiton/Anglo Coal joint venture, Klipspruit/ Zondagsfontein's eight-million tons a year operation. Of that, six-million tons a year would be attributable to BHP Billiton.