The New South Wales Department of Planning is exhibiting the company’s completion of mining plans, including its recent environmental assessment, until April 14.

 

The mine in the Western coalfields produces about 2 million tonnes of saleable thermal coal from the Lithgow coal seam.

 

The remaining longwall panels 29 to 31 are expected to be finished by the end of 2011, requiring Xstrata to apply for state government approval as the current mining consent expires in August.

 

Longwall 29 was initially designed to be 250m wide, but the total void width was scaled back to 220m as an extra subsidence precaution, while the void width of Longwall 30 is 226m and Longwall 31 is 220m.

 

Chain pillars and main heading pillars will be 25m wide rib to rib.

 

Once complete, Xstrata will then target remnant areas for partial extraction over the next two to three years using continuous miners.

 

“These predominantly include barrier pillars within the existing workings of longwalls 1 to 28, which were not extracted as part of the original longwall mining campaign,” Xstrata said in its final EA.

 

But the company will release an extraction plan detailing the methods used for the remnant areas closer to when this mining will start.

 

With the remnant mining period expected to end by 2013-14, rehabilitation activities are anticipated to take another 18-24 months.

 

Maintenance and monitoring will follow for a period of five years.

 

While the final land use plans are still undergoing review through a stakeholder engagement process, from a workshop Xstrata found the preferred outcome generally included a combination of grazing and bushland/wildlife habitat, “with the option of retaining some areas for future mining-related purposes where applicable”.

 

Baal Bone’s workforce includes 190 full-time positions and the operation started longwall mining in late 1985.