Always accused of being behind their metalliferous counterparts in embracing change, coal owners today have a radically different view of the role of contractors in underground mines.
Gone are the days when cutting coal and longwall development activities were regarded as the exclusive domain of permanent workers. Gone too are the days when the only work handed out to contractors was dirty, dangerous, one-off jobs, like negotiating tricky geological conditions.
While in many cases contractors continue to perform these jobs, the scope of their activities has expanded into most operational areas, including, most recently, full-blown mining at two Australian operations.
The question is, will this become the way of the future? Most contractors believe not. The main stumbling block preventing entry into longwall mining is the huge capital investment required to put in a longwall and associated infrastructure such as conveyors. The site-specificity of longwall equipment also makes it difficult for a contractor to simply uplift it and put it in place somewhere else. Alternatives exist, whereby the owner could buy the longwall and then let the contractor run it, but there remains the widely held perception, ground in custom and practice, that once an owner has spent several millions on a longwall, he might as well run it himself.
As Colin Zwolinski, managing director of Shaft and Tunnel remarked: “There needs to be a commitment from both sides. If coal companies are unwilling or unable to commit to a long-term relationship with a service provider with regards to the operation of their mines, it makes it difficult for any service provider to commit to millions of dollars in equipment, personnel and training, not knowing if there will be a home for that investment.”
These are only some of the factors, combined with the perceived unwillingness of coal owners to commit to long-term contracts, which suggest that in the foreseeable future contractors will not penetrate underground coal mining to the same extent as they have in metalliferous mines. But there is no doubt things have changed substantially in recent years. Increasingly contractors are being called on to perform mine development and longwall development drivage; work such as the establishment of Queensland mines Crinum, Moranbah North and Newlands by Thiess, or the longwall development work of Allied Mining Services at MIM’s Oaky Creek in central Queensland.
The success of contractors at operations such as Moranbah North will undoubtedly help the battle to prise open areas traditionally guarded as core competencies by coal operators and unions. The Moranbah contract, described as win-win, was for 8.5km of drivage using place changing, Shell’s chosen development method. According to Steve Newson, Moranbah North’s technical services manager, Allied had excellent management and integrated well on site.
“Once we had decided to use our equipment and put in place changing, next thing we know the site manager they were proposing came out from the USA and had a great deal of experience in place changing,” he said.
In many cases it is the newer operations, particularly in Queensland, that have been able to use contractors more readily because of less restrictive work place agreements. While many contractors and operators argue that the union has “begun to see the light on the use of contractors”, Greg Dalliston, CFMEU district union inspector in Queensland, said it was the use of the word contractor that had changed, rather than the union’s attitude. Dalliston said the CFMEU saw contract labour as people who performed ad hoc jobs for one or two shifts and then left site. “Take the 20km of drivage at Oaky Creek (being done by Allied). We don’t see them as contractors. They are more like permanent workers. They live in the community. Our major concern is from the safety side when contractors bring in inexperienced people who are not from a mining background to do difficult dangerous work like sealing up the goaf.”
Another recent growth area for contractors is longwall change-outs and installations.
The establishment of Mackay-based Mastermyne three years ago was in response to growing demand from operators to farm out this work to contractors. Today, about 50% of Mastermyne’s work is longwall changeouts for operations such as Kenmare, Moranbah North, Oaky North and Newlands.
Other contractors such as Brambles and Shaft & Tunnel offer dry or wet hiring of specialist equipment for change-outs. Shaft & Tunnel’s Zwolinksi said the most consistent work was providing dry or wet hiring of support equipment the company owns, sells or manufactures.
This point touches on an often overlooked advantage of having contractors servicing underground coal operations. Driven as they are by the imperatives of tight margins, contractors put time and money into finding ways to do things better, cheaper and safer — an activity operators rarely have time to tinker with. Colrok for example, is trialing the use of augering at the Southland mine it is operating in the Hunter Valley, NSW. Originally an ACARP-funded project, Colrok bought the rights to develop the coal augering technology for commercial application. Colrok’s managing director, Brian Woolnough said the project, believed to be the first application of augering in an underground coal mine, had many exciting potential applications.
While contractors continue to explore ways of doing things better, the industry can still be heard deliberating about using them at all. Over the past year coal price pressures have found their way to contractors, making tendering very competitive and at times cut-throat. In some cases tenders have simply not been awarded as principals decided to wait out the current downturn. In other cases, contractors expressed despair that clients went straight to the bottom line and merely glossed over good safety records and professional management practices. Nevertheless, prevailing negative sentiment seems to be waning and many contractors predicted improvement.
“At the moment we are tendering for three or four contracts in the up-to-$10 million range and that hasn’t been happening in the past 12 months. Although the coal industry has generally remained flat over the past several years this, hopefully, is a sign that things are improving,” said Zwolinski of Shaft and Tunnel.
