AFTER three years at Moranbah North, Steve Newson, a self-confessed “boring middle-aged mining engineer”, is still ebullient about the project that originally brought him to Australia.

When he took the job as the mine’s technical services manager, Newson was not intimidated by the scale and grandeur of the project, nor by the odd $500 million Shell was prepared to invest to make the mine state-of-the-art. He had, after all, spent two years as the project manager for the design and construction of Britain’s underground repository for nuclear waste — a proposed $8 billion investment.

What had him a tad worried was how he would feel being rooted to one spot, working on one project. Would he stay interested? Three years down the track he believes working on a project with as much potential as Moranbah North is the answer to any mid-life crisis.

Newson’s coal experience dates from the early 1970s when he began working as an underground miner for the National Coal Board in Britain on one of the country’s then 1000 longwall faces. Some 10 years later he transferred to British Coal headquarters, where he built up specialist knowledge in strata control and the latest advances in longwall technology, travelling extensively through EEC countries to visit operating longwall mines.

In 1987 he was seconded to the United States Bureau of Mines for six months to learn about roof bolting and to teach American researchers about British face technology and techniques. It was there that he was first exposed to high productivity mines, an experience he says frightened him to death, but one which was to prove a salutary lesson. As someone who had cut his teeth in the world’s oldest and most respected coal industry, Newson was astonished to discover that using the same equipment as British mines, the Americans were achieving much higher productivity levels.

“They were using European equipment,” he said. “Nothing special about it — it was the same equipment we had. Except they had productivity levels about 4-5 times what we achieved in the UK. There were all sorts of factors to explain the differences, and I could go on for hours about geology, depths, stresses and IR issues. But they were using the same equipment. And that’s when I really came to understand the attitude, what I call the ‘can-do attitude’ of the Americans that I worked with.

“One of the general managers brought it home very clearly to me. He said the problem with you limeys is that you are limited by your own experience. What he meant by that was because we had seen so many bad conditions and had experience of so many problems we immediately started to lower our target, saying this or that will go wrong. He said he worked from the base of ignorance and if someone said a longwall could do 3 million tonnes per annum he bought it and expected it to do 3mtpa.”

Newson is not in awe of the Yanks, but he holds in high regard the benchmark productivity that is consistently achieved by US longwall mines. And though he might not like to admit it, some of that “can-do attitude” rubbed off on this limey.

Take yourself a spreadsheet, he says, do your sums on Moranbah North and you can easily get production figures of 6-9mtpa. Though Moranbah North’s official 1999 production budget sits at a “conservative” 4mt, Newson believes production could be higher. It is just as well because Moranbah North’s coal prep plant is hungry for at least 7mtpa, numbers Shell clearly believes the mine is capable of putting out eventually.

One of Newson’s greatest assets is his ability to see the big picture and work at the strategic level, gained during his remarkably diverse career. He helped downsize Britain’s ailing coal industry in the 1980s and was on the ground floor when British coal mines moved from passive roof support to roof bolting. He has put in longwalls and designed mines in countries such as India, Bangladesh, the USA and Egypt while working as an international mining consultant for seven years.

Russell Middleton, Moranbah North’s commercial manager said what he values most about Newson is his “holistic outlook”

“Steve is a person who doesn’t get embroiled in doing the task,” Middleton said. “He manages the process and people very well. (When he makes a management decision) he takes into consideration time horizons in terms of future outcomes. Not just the technical aspects but also the commercial outcomes and the impact on the business.”

In 1972, the first longwall Newson worked on had a 60-horsepower, or 45kW, compressed-air shearer with a single, fixed drum that extracted about 44 inches of coal.

“The shearer we’ve just put in (at Moranbah) is a 1510kW double ended ranging drum shearer that extracts 4.5-5m.”

Understanding what these technological leaps mean in theory is one thing, but having the courage to believe in their full potential and manage accordingly, is entirely another. It is precisely because he knows what the Moranbah North mine is capable of and because he refuses to be limited by attitudes and perceptions, that gives Newson the confidence to predict that Moranbah North can and will achieve world-class levels of performance — “well above anything achieved in Australia before”

Newson is the type of person who has no problem imparting the knowledge he gained around the world to every level of the organisation, Middleton added.

“It is people like that who are the team-players and who make up the mortar in a management team,” he said.