JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Coal miner Stanmore Coal announced on Wednesday that it would extract 300 000 t of previously uneconomic coal from the disused S2 pit at the Isaac Plains mine, in Queensland’s Bowen basin.
The company awarded a five-month contract to UGM Highwall Mining to start highwall mining operations at Isaac Plains, which Stanmore reopened in April this year after buying the formerly mothballed mine for $1 in November last year.
Highwall mining was a low-cost, low impact mining method to extract otherwise uneconomic coal at the end of an opencut pit life.
Stanmore said highwall mining would allow it to better use the significant infrastructure and fixed cost base already in place for the Isaac Plains opencut mining operations.
The additional 80 000 t/m of run-of-mine coal would be extracted at an estimated 20% lower than the current opencut cost, given the largely fixed nature of the infrastructure costs which were covered by opencut mining operations.
The increased coking coal production would be sold to existing and new customers in Asia.