A pre-conference workshop will be held on March 28 called Effective Planning in Longwall Operations with the aim of presenting philosophies and concepts of maintenance and operations planning for longwall operations. According to conference organisers this workshop would be of value to production and maintenance managers who want to maximise the utilisation of available resources and increase the company’s profitability.

Workshop leaders are Richard Johnson, director, and Stephen Patrick, senior consultant, of Paradigm Shift. Topics to be covered include improving planning performance in a longwall operation; measuring planning effectiveness; overcoming typical problems encountered during the planning process; making the best use of available resources; and optimising site held spares inventory levels.

This year’s conference features the following presentations:

Economic Overview

Clyde Henderson, director, Energy Economics, provides an economic overview which examines the outlook for coal - world demand, trends, pricing and market conditions; predicting demand; and supply.

Mike Knowles, director, PricewaterhouseCoopers, examines Improving Longwall Performance to Drive the Bottom Line. Subjects include using reliability approaches to improve longwall performance; using a life-cycle cost model to understand cost drivers and impacts of changing mine strategies; addressing equipment availability using basic reliability engineering approaches; establishing the information systems to support on-going improvements including the use of mobile computing applications

Bill Simes, associate director of Barlow Jonker asks whether new investments in longwalls are worth it. Among other issues, Simes will look at opportunities for investing in longwalls; what is needed to be profitable in the long term; and whether longwalls are the way to make an investment work.

Other speakers include

- Brian Nicholls, Brian Nicholls Mining

- Dr Frank Leschhorn, RAG Australia Coal

- Gary Fallon, MIM Exploration on 3-D seismic and its potential and applications in longwall

- David Hetherington, Baal Bone Mine

- Colin Macdonald, Moonee Colliery on Windblast management at Moonee

- Richard Johnson, Paradigm Shift

- Peter Roberts, Walter Construction Group

- Corrie Pitzer, SAFEMap

- Terry Medhurst, senior geotechnical consultant, Australian Mining Consultants, examines longwall caving and its implications for mining process improvement

Case Studies include:

- Shane Hansen, Crinum mine, on Setting Production Records at Crinum

- Jonathan Romcke, South Bulga, on the Introduction and Development of Longwall Automation at South Bulga

- Ugo Cario, Austral Coal, on the development of Tahmoor North and Bargo reserves

- Malcolm Waterfall and David Reece, Dartbrook Coal

- Bob Sherack, DBT Australia, will present a supplier’s perspective on +350m longwall faces.

International case studies will be given by Jock Nel and Hento Deale, on the Matla No 2 shortwall mine in South Africa and by Gary Buchan, on the Twentymile Coal Company, US.