Coal – left for a reason!
I have been working on a reserve study for last few weeks. The coal seam is of great quality, clean, and with about black and white separation. However the geology is extremely difficult and the seam is barely over 2 feet! The seam also splits with vanishings lower bench in places and to make miming worse, it has horrible “stack rock” (interlayerd sandstone and shale). It is so difficult to even make an isopatch map in such situations as you must be consistent in whatever you are mapping. If you are mapping the one bench, you can not map the full seam in other places and so on. So, I had to divide the entire reserve in various blocks and designate “full seam mining” and “main bench mining only”. Now I can contour! Well, I started defining the two different mining conditions based on the thickness of parting and finally end up choosing % recovery line as my boundary delineation. While talking this extreme complex nature of the coal seam, my supervisor pointed to the fact “whatever is left today, left for a reason”!
Coal mining started more than a century back. Way back then coal was everywhere in coal producing countries and regions. That time people would not require a geologist to mine coal. So, the easiest to get coals are all gone by strip mining. Then more than more coals are gone which are shallow and thick and had good roof conditions. So, after a century we are left with coals that were not easy to mine in old time. With coal price being really high these days mining companies are willing to spend more and more money to reach very difficult coal seams. Many times, people are also going back to the old mines to get pillars that were left during old mining job. So, expect more and more challenging work in coal world in future. We have been mining coal for more than a century and we will be mining more many long years with every year reaching a more difficult coal seam (well, if the price keeps rising!)
Related posts:
