The Coal Operators’ Conferences have played a significant role in bringing about and making the industry aware of technological improvement and the modernisation that has been undertaken in the coal mining industry, hence the improvement of production and productivity, he told International Coal News.
“The year 2015 can be appropriately described as ‘annus horribilis’ for the Australian and worldwide coal mining industries,” he said.
“It was a year marked with the drop in coal price, a record number of mine closures and redundancies as well as the signing of the Paris Agreement on climate change -- all this being gloomy news.
“However it was also the year of improved production capacities from both underground and surface operations of modern mines.”
The Coal 2016 conference, scheduled for February 10-12, will address a variety of topics on modern coal mining operations.
A significant number of field based case studies from both surface and underground operations will be presented. Several papers will 53 papers over the three days conference.
Topics covered include ground control, gas drainage, coal burst and mine safety. On gas drainage, in inseam drilling of a 2000m long borehole, drilled with a combination of slide and rotary drilling will be presented.
The recent emphasis on tendon (fibre glass, rock and cable bolt) reinforcement technology including the recently developed method of determining the actual shear strength of cable bolts using a new University of Wollongong double shear apparatus will be discussed.
In general, papers on ground control dominates the three days conference, followed by mine gas drainage, coal bursts, both gas pressure and stress based, mine fires and general mine safety.
“Many new ideas, innovations and safety improvements have been at the centre of discussion and documentation in these conferences,” Aziz said.
At present there are 586 published papers on line and documented in 15 proceedings. These papers have attracted around 558000 downloads as of January 29th, 2016, since going online in 2008. An additional 53 papers will be added on line from this conference. These papers are mostly from Australia but include papers from Canada, China, Czech Republic, Germany, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, New Zealand Turkey, UK, and USA.
The conference is organised by the University of Wollongong mining engineering and is supported by the Illawarra branch of Aus IMM and Mining Managers’ Association of Australia. The conference is sponsored by Jenmar, DSI and Minova Australia, Others exhibiting their products, include AROA, Atlas Copco Rentals, Mine Services, Quarry Mining and LVA.
Visit http://www.coalconference.net.au for online conference registration, sponsorship, product exhibition and past conference papers.
