Burton Coal Mine, Queensland, Australia

Burton is located in Queensland's Bowen Basin, 150km south west of the coastal town of Mackay. It produced its first coal in November 1996. An open-pit operation, Burton has a production capacity of around 4.5Mt/y, with 80% of its output being high-quality coking coal for the export market.

The mine was developed as a joint venture between Portman Mining (95%) and Thiess Contractors (5%). In mid-1999, Germany's RAG Coal International bought Portman's holding for a total of AU$200m, of which AU$163m was cash, so increasing its interest in the Australian coal industry. In 2004, RAG sold its holding in Burton to the US-based coal company, Peabody Energy, together with its North Goonyella underground mine, also in Queensland, and its Twentymile mine in Colorado, USA, for a total of $421m.

GEOLOGY AND RESERVES

Burton's resources are hosted in the Permian Rangal Coal Measures. The main Leichhardt and Vermont coal seams coalesce over much of the area to form the 11m-thick Burton seam, while the Burton Rider seam is developed immediately above this in its central part. The coal measures dip at 8–32° towards the east.

Mineable in-situ reserves are 54.6Mt to a depth of 80m and 65.8Mt to a depth of 100m. The deposit contains both opencut and underground coal resources. Opencut coal resources in the Burton seam occur along a 16km strike length and are adequate to support a 12-year mine life, with at least the same again in underground resources. The company also controls the adjacent Plumtree and Kerlong resources, which have not yet been exploited.

COAL QUALITY

Burton produces a high-quality coking coal with the lowest sulphur content for any Australian hard coking coal. It also has one of the lowest ash contents. The mine can also provide a semi-soft product for use as either a coking blend component or for pulverised coal injection.

Burton thermal coal is a low-sulphur, low-nitrogen, high-energy product with high ash fusion temperatures and can be easily pulverised.

MINING METHOD

Mining follows conventional opencut practice, with waste being stripped from 5m-high advancing benches along a 1,000m-long pit face. Bench advances range from 100–200m, each being stripped sequentially from the surface to the top of the coal seam.

Thiess provides all the mining services to Burton. The company uses a Liebherr R996 hydraulic excavator fitted with a 30m³ bucket as its main production shovel, loading 218t-capacity Caterpillar 789B and 789C haul trucks. Three other Liebherr shovels are also used on site, one R994 and two R994Bs.

COAL PREPARATION

All run-of-mine coal is cleaned before transport by rail to Dalrymple Bay for export. Raw coal is crushed to –50mm, with prime hard coking coal recovered using dense medium cyclones. Middlings from this circuit are re-treated to produce thermal coal. Variable amounts of coking coal product can be diverted into the thermal coal to enhance it, if needed.

Fine raw coal is handled in spirals and Jameson flotation cells to produce further prime hard coking coal. The products are dewatered in centrifuges and a belt filter before being recombined into the coking and thermal products.

EXPORTS

The clean coal is loaded from product bins at the washery into 180t-capacity, triple-trailer road trains, and hauled 35km along a specially constructed haulroad to the Mallawa siding on Queensland Railways. The system has the capacity to haul some 8,000t/d. An automated loading system on the coal preparation plant loading bins allows remote operation of the loading gates by the vehicle operator.

At Mallawa, the coal is side-dumped from the trucks adjacent to the respective stockpiles, so as to minimise the requirement for bulldozing. A Caterpillar D11N bulldozer fitted with a coal blade is used to push the dumped coal up on to the stockpiles. After reclaim, the coal is rail hauled 170km in 7,500t-capacity trains to the port at Dalrymple Bay. The Dalrymple Bay facility has a current nominal capacity of 33Mt/y, having recently been expanded.

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