Let those hardy souls go to Rio and dance the samba all night if they will, making sure they dodge zika virus-laden mosquitoes and stray bandits from the city’s notorious favelas. Let them sit around and watch exciting sports like, ahem, archery and clay pigeon shooting.
The Hog for his part would prefer to stay home and bask in the glory being created by some of Whitehaven Coal’s crew at the Narrabri longwall mine, which has reported a new monthly production record of 1.057 million tonnes of ROM coal in April exceeding the previous monthly record of 0.984Mt ROM coal established in January 2016.
While The Hog doesn’t want to get too far ahead of himself here, if he takes that monthly figure and multiplies that by 12, he gets a yearly figure that comes to more than 12Mtpa. That well and truly exceeds the 10Mtpa benchmark, which is seen by many in the industry as the “holy grail” of longwall production achievement.
Following the record month in April and a complete longwall changeout in the June quarter, ROM coal production was 1.370Mt for the quarter, according to the company’s latest results.
Full year ROM coal production was 6.888Mt in a year which included two full longwall changeouts.
Coal production in Narrabri’s longwall panel LW05 was completed in mid-May and the longwall changeout completed in June. Longwall production in LW06 had commenced before the end of the June.
The run rate for the year excluding the changeouts was significantly over 8.5Mt.
Only a single longwall changeout is scheduled for FY2017.
The current longwall panel, LW06 will be the final 300m wide panel at the mine.
Production from the first 400m wide panel (LW07) is expected to commence in the second half of FY2017.
The team at Narrabri had a few initial teething problems with the longwall software and automation systems but they appear to be well and truly ironed out now.
The mine has now embraced the new automation and innovation to gain significant operating performance improvements.
In 2014, Narrabri implemented full shearer automation, which boosted longwall productivity and horizon control.
Utilisation of full shearer automation – with no input from operators – can now exceeding 94% on average and is 95 to 100% except near gate ends.
The mine also made the wise decision - it would seem - not to go down the longwall top coal caving route, instead reconfiguring the size of the face.
Seam height is 8m to 10m, but Whitehaven determined that extending the longwall face—to as wide as 400m—will be more cost effective than would mining shorter face widths with longwall top coal caving techniques.
These decisions appear to be paying dividends for the mine and optimizing mine production.
Whitehaven Coal’s shareprice, once languishing down the 30c mark, has now trading beyond the $1 level and rising consistently despite the all the shocks to the world financial system like the Brexit debacle.
Hogsback reckons that’s worth as much excitement and jumping up and down as a gold medal at the Rio Olympics.
