With the April 15 wall collapse disaster killing two members of a development crew, Yancoal said investigations had shut down development coal production at the mine.
Austar ended up producing 592,000t of saleable coal for the recent quarter – a 10% fall from the corresponding period of 2013.
Over to the Ashton longwall mine, also in the Hunter Valley, output slipped by 71% year-on-year to 142,000t of saleable production in the recent quarter.
The fall was credited to a scheduled longwall move and delays caused by “geotechnical issues” at the face.
At its Gloucester Basin mining operations in New South Wales, Yancoal completed mining at the Bowen Road North open cut in July while industrial action set back throughput at the nearby Duralie washplant.
Total saleable output for the Gloucester mines was 543,000t for the September quarter – a 9% fall year-on-year.
The Yarrabee mine in Queensland’s Bowen Basin fared worse with a 13% fall year-on-year to 803,000t.
Yancoal attributed this decline to a failure of a low wall at the mine early in the recent quarter.
“Yarrabee recovered strongly by quarter’s end, achieving total tonnage numbers ahead of budgeted run of mine expectations, maximising the recent introduction of direct feeding into the crusher to achieve both cost and time savings,” Yancoal said.
At the Donaldson Coal operations in New South Wales, which were down 4% year-on-year to 465,000t of saleable output, Yancoal completed rehabilitation of the Tasman open cut mine plus made a cost-cutting restructure at the Abel Underground mine.
The flagship Moolarben open cut coal mine in New South Wales had the best result with a 5% year-on-year lift in production to 1.72mt of saleable coal.
Yancoal said yield improvements and productivity gains were made there via a product optimisation strategy.
Overall metallurgical coal sales were down 13% year-on-year to 1.94Mt for the recent quarter while thermal coal sales lost 7% year-on-year to 2.05Mt.
Yancoal held on to its 2014 calendar year guidance of producing 16.5-17Mt of saleable coal.
